



,*££■ 



ARCADIAN DAYS 

AMERICAN LANDSCAPES 

IN 

NATURE AND ART 



BY 

W. II. DOWNES 




ILLUSTRATED BY A. H. BICKNELL 



BOSTON 
ESTES & LAURIAT 

PUBLISHERS 







Copyright, 1891, 
By ESTES & LAURIAT. 



Presswork uy John Wilson and Son, 
University Press. 



THE GROUP" 



OF KINDRED SPIRITS WHO USED TO MEET IN BICKNELL S 

STUDIO TO TALK ABOUT ART, IN AN ATMOSPHERE 

OF GOOD FELLOWSHIP AND TOBACCO SMOKE. 



INTRODUCTION. 



IN these sketches, which were written out of 
doors, I have first endeavored to record in 
appropriate words the impressions caused by 
the actual landscapes spread out before my 
eyes, somewhat as the landscape painter would 
record his impressions in his language. Then 
I have ventured to recall the works of certain 
painters whose canvases have been brought to 
mind by a sight of Nature. It may be consid- 
ered rash to bring together in this way famous 
names and some which are almost unknown to 
the great world ; but an art critic should be 
ready to incur such a risk, if he has any convic- 
tions, and surely he may never feel safer than 
when judging men's works by the standard of 
Nature. 

It would not be the easiest thing in the world 
to determine which method of suggesting Nature 



INTRODUCTION. 

is the more difficult, the painter's or the writer's. 
At best, no one can give more than a hint. 
Cold types and rebellious pigments alike are 
inadequate means of expression. 

The simplest rustic subjects have seemed the 
best, because they are the most familiar. It is 
hoped that some of these sketches may appeal 
by their truthfulness to the reader's pleasant 
memories. But the whole value of the work, if 
it has any value, lies in its tendency, in what it 
merely hints at, — the great desirability, for in- 
stance, of using one's own eyes and of cultivat- 
ing one's powers of observation ; for how much 
of pleasure and profit this might add to the lives 
of most people, no matter in what particular 
sphere of action they may be placed! 

We see what we look for. It is best to be 
on the watch for beauty, and to let none of it 
escape our vigilance. 

W. H. D. 



Sutherland Road, 

Boston, April, 1891. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

A Day in June 17 

On the River 30 

The Everlasting Hills 43 

By the Shore 54 

The Abandoned Farmhouse 67 

In Field and Meadow 76 

The Thunder Storm 89 

Sunset Effects 102 

In the Woods 115 

Moods of the Sea 129. 

Nocturne 145 

The Beauty of Common Things 159 

The Future of American Landscape Art . 170 



A DAY IN JUNE 



The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion ; the tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colors and their forms, were then to me 
An appetite: a feeling and a love, 
That had no need of a remoter charm, 
By thought supplied, or any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye. 

— Wordsworth. 




A DAY IN JUNE. 



IT has stormed at intervals during six days 
and nights. The wind has been blowing 
more or less sourly from the east. Heavy 
rains have fallen ; thick fogs hung over the 
water ; the surf roared loudly in the night, and 
a gale, swept in from the Atlantic, howled about 
the house most dismally and monotonously for 
twenty-four hours. The whole world seemed 

17 



1 8 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

dark and chilly ; the summer's face was hid ; 
and every one longed for the light and warmth 
of the sun. 

This morning, lo ! a dazzling, sparkling, flash- 
ing, glittering stream of welcome sunlight flooded 
the glad earth and the laughing ocean ; the birds 
sang with an unwonted exuberance on all sides ; 
and the scent of sweetness and the softness of 
the airs that blew over the meadows proclaimed 
unmistakably that the wind was in the west. 
Thus began this day of rare beauty. The rain 
has refreshed the grass and foliage, which have 
taken on richer tints of green ; the face of the 
landscape appears washed clean ; in all the roads 
the dust has been laid ; and there is a wonderful 
clarity in the atmosphere, which to breathe is a 

joy- 
Great masses of white clouds move across the 
sky. At one moment the sun is obscured, the 
next it bursts forth again brighter than before. 
Between the ragged lines of the flying vapors 
the blue upper sky is bluer than men dare paint 
it. One exquisite effect of light and shade 
after another comes and goes from moment 






A DAY IN JUNE. 



19 



to moment. The gentle breeze rustles softly 

through the grove; the tall trees whisper a 

liquid lullaby, and swing their topmost branches 

in a capricious rhythm, as 

full of natural grace as the 

rise and fall of the sea's 

waves or the undulations of 

a field of rye. Down in the 

swamp the fleurs de lis are 

royally adorning the bright 

day, and beneath the rank 

tufts of verdure the frogs 

twang out their 'cello solos 

of batrachian satisfaction. 

How handsome the moist 
brown earth is in a ploughed 
field ! This one has a color 
richer than chocolate in some lights, 
and the slope is fine. On one edge of the field 
is a row of low quince trees still in blossom, and 
at the base of the rickety rail fence grow ferns 
and wild geraniums among the tall grasses and 
weeds. An unpainted barn, of proportions more 
generous than those of the owner's house, shows 




20 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



its weather-stained walls 
and roof above the hill, 
and higher still rise the 
noble aged forms of two 
tall cottonwood trees whose 
leaves are full of murmur- 
ous confidences. Here is 
the familiar spot where the 
road to the shore makes a 
pretty bend, and, descend- 
ing a little hill, forks, and 
is lost to view. A group of 
scraggy apple-trees stands, 
or rather crouches, along- 
side the stone-wall at the 
bend, and casts pleasant shades 
upon the inviting grassy bank beneath. 
As their limbs overhang the highway, it may be 
presumed that they furnish more fruit to the 
vagrant, and the perpetually hungry small boy, 
than to their owner. In good apple years, how- 
ever, the farmers are glad to have all comers 
help themselves ; for apples are then almost as 
cheap as water in many parts of New England. 







A DAY IN JUNE. 



23 




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Down where the big willow trees droop over 
the little pond, the cows have come to take their 
morning cocktails. Their rich red hides make 
superb pictures, wherever they go, against the 



24 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

green background. If cows are more contented 
at any one given time than at another, this must 
be a season of especial comfort for them, before 
the voracious flies and the great heats of mid- 
summer have come to torment their patient 
souls. I never see a group of these decorative 
philosophers under a tree without thinking of 
Johnny Johnston, and it is the same with all 
who are familiar with his masterly cattle pic- 
tures. Nothing could testify more eloquently 
to the truth of his works than this involuntary 
reference to them in the very presence of 
Nature. 

Near midday, without warning, arrives a sud- 
den shower, which passes quickly. Now the 
sky assumes new shapes of wonder in the south, 
hangs out fresh banners of glorious hues. Stately 
cumuli sail eastward, luminous like sun-touched 
snowbanks as to their tops, purple and blue 
and lilac beneath, with spaces of unspeakably 
delicate gray. Reaches of tender blue appear 
between the shining peaks of this aerial Ober- 
land ; the cloud-shadows chase one another across 
the fields and across the water ; the distant 



A DAY IN JUNE. 2$ 

shower slants its azure veil athwart the hills, 
while on either side the lovely amber sunlight 
falls on the brilliant damp green fields, the 
sombre mass of the forest, the white sand of 
the beach, and the far-off red lighthouse at the 
end of the breakwater. What a pageant, what 
a treat for the eyes ! Everything shines. The 
air is full of life. Turn which way you will, 
the pictures are full of beauty. This is June, the 
youngest of the sisterhood of summer months, 
— capricious, changeful, and adorable. 

Among all the landscape artists known to 
fame, there is none capable of translating all 
the freshness, the sweetness, the intoxication of 
such a day. Corot got up early in the morn- 
ing and was at work before the night fog had 
cleared away, consequently he saw everything 
through gray spectacles ; moreover, he never 
saw New England at all, and had he seen her 
in such a vivid, gay, chromatic aspect as she 
wears to-day, I suspect he would have thought 
her loud. Constable was one of the few men 
who could paint changeable weather, and came 
very close to the truth of England's fickle cli- 



26 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

mate ; were he living Yankee instead of dead 
Briton, I would sooner commission him to paint 
an impression of the celestial carnival going on 
to-day than Claude Lorrain or Turner. Not 
even Ruysdael, giant as he was, whose name I 
never hear without mentally taking off my hat, 
not even the great Ruysdael could cope with 
Nature in such a frolicsome mood. We might 
recall a long list of names, and after all shake 
our heads at the end of it. Hobbema, Pous- 
sin, Gainsborough, Rousseau, Dupre, Daubigny, 
Courbet, Hunt, Inness, marshal them all in 
imposing array, and say whether they are great 
enough to paint the song of a bird, the scent 
of a hawthorn blossom, the breezy call of 
incense-breathing morn. It is surely no depre- 
ciation of their well-earned fame to pronounce 
them unequal to the task. All of these land- 
scapists are men of great achievements in their 
respective fields, yet I dare say they all have 
known at times what it is to wrestle mightily 
with Nature and to be thrown. For my part, 
I am devoutly thankful to each and all of them 
for the few shreds and fragments they have 



A DAY IN JUNE. 2J 

been able to preserve for us of the boundless, 
indescribable, and transcendent beauties of the 
rural world. It is enough glory for the greatest 
of them that they could merely suggest a gleam 
of sunlight, or the flutter of a leafy bough, or 
the slow, lifting movement of a billow on the 
sea. If you were to ask one of these painters 
what he had accomplished in his lifetime of 
toil and study and observation, he would prob- 
ably say that he had been enabled to give a 
few slight hints as to the true aspect of Nature. 
That is enough, and the verdict must be : Well 
done. 

The golden hours of the afternoon go by with 
magic rapidity, and the evening's approach is 
hardly perceived. The going-down of the sun 
is a quiet affair, with no flame of color ; in the 
west is a modest, ruddy token of good night, 
and interlacing bars of brass tremble in the 
level backgrounds of the sea for a while, till 
presently the moon peers from beyond the rim 
of the southeast, and disputes with vagrant 
clouds the rule of the night. Over the vast 
bosom of the waters hangs a mysterious half- 



28 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

light, in which the bats wheel their devious 
ways, as busily, as blindly, and as aimlessly, 
perchance, as we mortals pursue our progress 
through the mystery of our life. There is 
something so unreal in the quality of moon- 
shine that it makes our hold upon the material 
facts of the world seem feebler than by day. 
Nevertheless, it is always pleasant to see the 
moon prevail in its contest with the clouds. So 
now it comes forth full and clear, sending its 
silver track across the waves, gleaming pale 
upon the sail of yonder ghostly sloop, caressing 
the lawns and grassy slopes, making deeper the 
shadows everywhere. " Even the little valleys 
joy to glisten in her sight." 

I know three pictures of moonlight in which 
the naked truth seems to have been caught on 
the wing. Alexander Harrison's "Crepuscule" 
and D. Jerome Elwell's " Moonrise, Holland," 
are honors to American art. Daubigny painted 
a fine moonrise, which was among the pictures 
sold by M. Achille Oudinot in Boston in 1886; 
this was one of those marvels of rapid work in 
which Daubigny showed himself the peer of the 



A DAY IN JUNE. 



29 



greatest lanclscapists that ever lived, and seemed 
to reveal, as by an intuition, the inmost secrets 
of the country's heart. 







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ON THE RIVER. 



THE sun has got behind the long, wood- 
covered range of hills that borders the 
western bank of the river, so that nearly half 
the stream flows in an opulent shadow, where 
my boat drifts with a delicious leisure. From 
north to south the river makes a wide and grace- 
ful bend, sweeping in majestic silence seaward. 
Of the eastern shore I will say nothing except 
that there is a railroad there. The trees and 



ON THE RIVER. 3 I 

grass have done their best to hide the unseemly 
gashes cut by shovel and pick in the virgin 
slopes. There are places where the woods 
stoop over to see themselves reflected in dis- 
torted shapes in the looking-glass that Mother 

Eve used. 

" Inverted in the tide 
Stand the gray rocks, and trembling shadows throw, 

And the fair trees look over, side by side, 
And see themselves below." 

At one point a little brook, hardly stout 
enough to babble, slides down over mossy 
ledges from a neighboring spring, and loses it- 
self in the bigger waters. I am downright sorry 
that truth obliges me to refrain from calling 
it a babbling brook, and that a conscientious 
regard for literal fact compels the acknowledg- 
ment that it is so insignificant as not even to 
gurgle or murmur or purl. Nevertheless 'tis a 
pretty brooklet, and may not always be so 
dumb. There is mention in the first act of 
" Les Huguenots " of a certain ruisseau which 
murmures a peine. Near by is a steep, rocky 
promontory from which the boys dive. The 



32 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

channel makes close by the shore, and the water 
is more than twenty feet deep here. Its sur- 
face is black and smooth, and it looks treach- 
erous. A boy was drowned here once, but that 
does not prevent the thoughtless youngsters of 
to-day from enjoying their swimming baths in 
the same sombre spot. It is a fine, exhilarating 
sight to watch their supple young bodies as 
they plunge from the top of the rock, cleave the 
dark water, and shoot downward till they are 
lost to view in the depths, only to emerge, 
buoyant as corks and noisy with animal spirits, 
grasping a handful of mud or sand to prove 
that they have been to the bottom. Hunt's 
painting of "The Bathers" is a very vivid reali- 
zation of such a scene, where the rich darkness 
of a well-shaded pool sets off the handsome 
lustre of the wet flesh of a couple of athletic 
youths. The associations connected with the 
place where one took the first swimming les- 
sons are likely to be agreeable. How these 
rocks and hills were wont to echo our splash- 
ings and our shouts of boyish glee in the old 
days ! Now there is a new set of boys, with a 



ON THE RIVER. 33 

new assortment of natatorial tricks, a fresh 
vocabulary of slang, strange faces. Stay, there 
is one sturdy fellow who has the features and 
the gait of Ned T., who was killed at Spottsyl- 
vania. Can it be his — grandson? It seems not 
longer ago than yesterday when Ned and I were 
sporting together in this familiar locality: — 



- " ." 










" Cease ; thou know'st, 
He dies to me again, when talkM of." 

Now let the boat go with the current down 
to where the stream runs between broad mead- 
ows in which elms grow, the hills recede, and 
gray farmhouses and barns dot the broad peace- 
ful intervale. Between low shores like these, 
the river meanders more lazily, fringed with 



34 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

rushes, flags, and rank-smelling weeds, among 
which water-fowl hide. Beyond this wide and 
placid reach the bed of the stream narrows, 
and a gradual acceleration in the current's 
movement marks the approach to a tortuous, 
rough defile, hemmed in by rocky heights. 
Deep and swift the water glides between the 
stern granite gates of the gorge, washing the 
base of the cliff called Lover's Leap .which rises 
abruptly on the west bank. The vague legend, 
of pretended Indian origin, which gives this ro- 
mantic name to the steep, is slirnly " founded 
on fact," it is to be suspected ; and in this 
respect it is like many similar tales of the 
aborigines. The wild character of the scene is 
suggestive of Fenimore Cooper's stories, how- 
ever, and this would be a fitting place to read 
of the adventures of the Pathfinder. From a 
pictorial point of view, the roughness of the 
country, the density of the primitive woods that 
crown the rocks, and the strength of the torrent 
that rushes and tumbles over its harsh bed 
below, recall the rude and sturdy landscapes of 
Gustave Courbet among the Vosges mountains. 



ON THE RIVER. 



35 



There is more than one cove where the sunlight 
never comes, and black pools, haunted by in- 




numerable fish, sleep in perpetual shadow. In 
the seams and crannies of the precipice, mosses, 
fern, and stunted cedars find a precarious foot- 



36 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

hold. It would hardly surprise one to see 
golden-haired Lorelei emerge from the twilight 
depths of the stream to lure the traveller to 
amorous death in the dark swirl of the rapids. 

Another corner is turned, and the flood lies 
shining once more in full sunlight, for so sud- 
denly does the scene change : it is with the 
river as with mortals — it is ever the same, 
yet none of its days or hours are alike. 

What means this slow advance, this expanding 
of the shores, and the dull roar that comes to 
our ears from below ? The round-topped hills 
encircle no less than a lake ; trees stand a 
fathom deep under water ; and the basin seems 
fuller than nature meant it to be. Down the 
stream there is an abrupt and untimely end to 
all this placidity, where a long curved dam lets 
fall the unsuspecting sheet of water and breaks 
its smooth face into a foamy chaos, noisy, law- 
less, turbulent, — a vulgar Niagara. The dull 
roar has grown into a continuous and mighty 
thunder. From the apron of the dam the dis- 
concerted river flees wildly in a thousand amber 
eddies, and in shame and confusion slips between 



ON THE RIVER. 37 

foul banks lined with clattering mills whose sub- 
terranean race-ways discharge their prostituted, 
soiled, and enslaved contents back to the indig- 
nant bosom of the mother-stream. Thus is the 
river subjugated by man's arts and turned to 
the uses of business : its purity sullied, its peace 
destroyed, its beauty disregarded, its power alone 
respected. But it has within itself that blessed 
faculty of letting bygones be bygones, of filter- 
ing away and leaving behind it all noisome sedi- 
ments, — that forgetfulness of evil characteristic 
of healthy temperaments. Every surrounding- 
soon becomes rustic and cleanly again. Limpid 
brooks bring their icy tribute ; the sun sends 
down its tenderest shafts of warmth to cheer 
the ill-used waters ; soft westerly breezes stir 
the grave face of the saddened stream to a reluc- 
tant smile. Flowing so through many miles of 
wood and farm and hill, under consoling skies, 
the river comes at last to the lovely village of 
Wapawoag, where no wonder it is content to lin- 
ger long. A perpetual Sabbath reigns in Wapa- 
woag, and the river is its prophet. No mills, no 
dams, no noise, no dirt, no business here. At 



38 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

intervals the plainest of wooden bridges spans 
the river, and there is usually a motionless, rapt, 
credulous fisherman fishing from each bridge, 
from which he dangles his ill-shod feet. In 
round-shouldered expectancy he hangs over the 
particular pool presumed to contain countless 
perch, and yet who has ever seen him catch 
anything ? 

On one side of the river a wide, elm-shaded 
road runs north and south, lined with houses 
built in the eighteenth century, several of which 
are the homes of retired sea-captains. The long, 
sloping roof, the heavy timbers, the absence of 
verandas, the unhewn stone which serves as the 
lower step to the narrow porch, the grotesque, 
old knocker, and the bit of tin which makes 
rusty proclamation that the dwelling is insured, 
— all this announces plainly that we are in the 
presence of an old settler. The unkempt gar- 
den, all overgrown with vagabond vines, rasp- 
berry bushes, and shaggy weeds, extends back 
of such a venerable mansion to the edge of the 
river, where a century-old willow bends over 
the water, with a crazy skiff moored to a ring 




Ms 






i ' • fi 1 



^ 



ON THE RIVER. 41 

in its scarred trunk. Just above this neglected 
garden, which the bees have all to themselves 
through long days together, stands the ancient 
store, which stood in the same spot in the year 
1776, and doubtless held the same variegated 
stock of goods, including the best of New 
England rum, the same that the sea-captains 
used to drink as they sat in the back room 
stormy nights and spun yarns of their prodig- 
ious exploits in the war of 1812, when Wapa- 
woag was a thriving seaport and fitted out 
privateers to prey upon the commerce of Eng- 
land. There is a picturesque, irregular foot- 
bridge near the store, connecting that centre 
of trade and local news with the handsome 
"place" of a rich Bostonian who passes the 
six months from April till October on the west 
shore of the river, in a red villa surrounded 
by wide verandas, from which a smooth-shaven 
lawn slopes very gradually down to the water. 
Pretty maidens and athletic manly youths play 
tennis here, in becoming white flannel costumes, 
and wake the echoes with their cries and laugh- 
ter. On moonlight evenings the river overhears 



42 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

some foolish talk in the coquettish Whitehall 
boat, but it never betrays these summer secrets 
confided to it, maintaining to the end its sage 
policy of forgetfulness. I would that my poor 
pen were capable of describing in adequate 
terms the hundred beautiful pictures made by 
the river in its progress through the sweet old 
town, — that last etape in its march to the sea. 
All its memories at last are drowned in the 
ocean, its identity is lost, it becomes a mere 
drop in the world's bucket, a nameless part of 
the infinite deep. 




THE EVERLASTING HILLS. 



ALL generous natures love the hills. The 
love of liberty flourishes in high places. 
Tyrants could never enslave the mountaineers. 
Switzerland must ever be a republic. The 
Scotch highlanders are invincible friends of 
freedom. In our own country slavery and 

43 



44 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



rebellion could not get a foothold in the loyal 
mountains of West Virginia and East Ten- 
nessee. It is useless to multiply instances, 
because history is so full of eloquent illustrations 
that volumes would be needed to set forth the 
virtue and liberality of the dwellers on the 
heights. It is not hard to appreciate and pity 
the proverbial homesickness of the wandering 
Swiss ; and who, except a railroad contractor, 
does not abhor a flat country ? Thank Heaven 
that New England is no dreary, endless prairie, 
no monotonous plain. Surely no one can accuse 
our domain of a want of diversity. From the 
St. Lawrence to Long Island Sound it is an 
almost uninterrupted succession of rugged hills, 
with peaceful valleys lying between. All our 
hills have certain characteristics in common, and 
the giants of the Presidential range are but 
exaggerated types of their kind. Their pre- 
eminence, however, is undisputed and indispu- 
table. There is nothing finer in all the poetry 
relating to mountains than that proud soliloquy 
which Emerson puts into the mouth of Mount 
Monadnock, beginning: — 



THE EVERLASTING HILLS. 



45 



"Every morn I lift my head, 
Gaze on New England underspread. 



The conscious- 
ness of might, the 
superb calm of ac- 
knowledged power 
and dominion, the 
lofty disdain of a 
Titan for the pig- 
mies that fret and 
fume at his feet, all 
this and more is ex- 
pressed in the grim, 
quaint speech of the 
mountain. Every- 
thing is relative, so 
that Mount Wash- 
ington, who would 
be a very petty 
prince indeed among 
the Alps, is every 
inch a king in New 
Hampshire. I pity 
all those persons 







46 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

who do not know the White Mountain re- 
gion. It is not the height in feet and inches 
of these overgrown hills, nor their supply of 
midsummer snow, which is apt to run short 
in a hot August ; it is the nameless charm of 
a locality unlike any other, at once wild and 
suave, full of piquant contrasts, affording oppor- 
tunities for ambitious alpestrians to break their 
necks ; for mediocre landscape-painters to betray 
their incompetency ; for meditative people to 
"loaf, and invite their souls " ; for amateur pedes- 
trians to discover how long a mile is ; and for 
all comers to breathe an air as exhilarating as 
champagne and a vast deal purer. 

It is a well-known fact that the highest 
mountains do not command the most pleasing 
prospects, nor are they always imposing in 
proportion to their size. A tumble from the 
cliff that frowns over Tuckerman's Ravine would 
doubtless be just as fatal as a fall from the 
top of the Matterhorn. What is sublimity ? 
I have been more frightened by a thunder- 
storm on the summit of Mount Clinton than I 
was on the precarious peak of the Wetterhorn ; 



THE EVERLASTING HILLS. 49 

and there is no reason for doubting that the dis- 
charge of a pailful of suds on to an ant-hill is as 
grave an event for the ants as the flood was to 
Noah and his contemporaries. 

The mountains excite the imagination more 
deeply than any other natural objects ; not be- 
cause of their dimensions and forms so much 
as because there is always a farther side to 
them which we do not see. The mind is 
affected by the unknown, and eagerly believes 
it to be more wonderful, more pleasant, than 
the known. After you have ascended to the 
top of a hill, it has no more secrets for you, 
and you are disillusion^. When clouds hide the 
upper part of a mountain, it seems higher than 
when all the peak is visible. I remember see- 
ing, in the valley which leads up to the village 
of Zermatt, the lower portion of a great glacier 
nearly overhead which had the appearance of 
hanging from the very sky, — a spectacle so 
startling and awful that in the few minutes it 
was visible it became more vividly impressed 
upon my memory than the aspect of Monte 
Rosa itself in all its majesty. Probably one of 



50 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



the reasons that 
almost all pic- 
tures of moun- 
tains are so un- 
satisfactory is 
the want of this 
potent element 
of mystery. It 
is not the only 
reason, and yet 
it is not easy to 
explain in so 
many words 
why objects, 
grand in them- 
selves, should 
not be success- 
fully painted, 
provided always 
that the artist 
attempting the 
task be fitly inspired. Our hills have tempted 
many capable pencils, but the results of all en- 
deavors have not added to the fame of American 




THE EVERLASTING HILLS. 51 

art, nor have they exalted the glory of the hills. 
Church travelled to the Ancles, Bierstadt to the 
Rocky Mountains, as if the humblest hummock 
of our land would not have been enough to give 
them pause. The best impression of a moun- 
tainous district that I have seen was a large study 
by Daubigny, which represented the sterile slope 
of a huge eminence in the Pyrenees. It was 
a suggestion. Without trying to be a picture, 
it gave the massive structure of the subject. 
There was nothing in the least scenic in it ; it 
was not even agreeable ; but to one who knows 
the austere solitude, the solemn grandeur of 
such high places, it was striking for its simple 
and unalloyed truthfulness. It conveyed a sense 
of isolation which was almost oppressive. 

The once inaccessible tops of the loftiest 
peaks among the Alps were peopled, in the 
fancy of the peasants, with imps and gnomes, 
who rolled down stones and started frightful 
avalanches to scare away climbers who at- 
tempted to scale those accursed heights. Rip 
Van Winkle found Hudson's phantom crew 
among the granite fastnesses of the Catskills, 



52 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 




where they diverted 
themselves with hob- 
goblin ten-pins, making 
ghostly thunder. Every 
considerable mountain- 
peak, from Teneriffe to 
Fujiyama, has its le- 
gend, be it more or less 
romantic. One is never 
alone on a hill-top. 

It is odd how the lay 
of the land causes a 
small elevation to command a handsome view. 
Nothing is so genial and pretty to look down 
on as a wide valley watered by a sinuous creek 
and cut up into a patchwork of cultivated fields, 



THE EVERLASTING HILLS. 53 

with here and there a farm-house surrounded 
by its cluster of barns and outbuildings, and 
shaded by its great trees. A crop of buckwheat 
or a freshly ploughed field gives a pleasant ac- 
cent of variety among the rich greens of past- 
ures and of woods. The white steeple of the 
meeting-house is seldom lacking in the view. 
I have heard an artist say that white buildings 
did not look well in a landscape, but I must 
disagree with him on that point. There was 
a time when all country houses in New England 
were painted white with green blinds — that is, 
all those that were painted at all. The custom 
was so nearly universal that, when the reaction 
came, it was too violent ; and to-day, white is 
the least popular of paints for outside work ; 
but it is not a risky prophecy to say that the 
day will come when white will not be so scorned. 
There are already indications that the absolute 
rule of red and yellow is becoming wearisome. 
The old-fashioned, rambling, manorial farm- 
house, as white as paint can make it, never 
looks out of place either embowered in green 
foliage, or lifting its dazzling facade to meet 
the deep blue of the morning sky. 







-- 


-SS^—i-.^- 


-- -.- ^'- -~- 


z^~ r ~ T ' '-" -■ 




-~; 




'-j==JL\ T 




BY THE SHORE. 



THE sound of the surf upon the rocks at 
times is soothing and musical ; but there 
are other times when it becomes almost fright- 
ful, and the solid earth itself seems to tremble 
under its regular blows. The days of fair 
weather, of sunshine, and soft southwesterly- 
breezes are most becoming to the shore, and 
bring out its colors best. Ours is, as Mrs. 
Hemans very justly remarked, "a stern and 
rock-bound coast " ; and harsh as those lofty 
and jagged cliffs, with the white line of break- 
ers at their feet, must appear to mariners in 

54 



BY THE SHORE. 



55 




danger of com- 
ing ashore, 
they are really 
as picturesque, 
and often as 
grandiose, as 
anything in 
our scenery. 
The sea has 
slowly eaten away their soft 
spots, thereby modelling most 
fantastical protuberances 
which occasionally take on the 
likeness of things both vegeta- 
ble and animal. Caverns there 
are wherein a strange light 
penetrates, and as the tide 
rises strange wild noises issue 
thence. A curtain of marvel- 
lous texture, from mermaids' 
looms, waves in graceful wel- 



w/mWMp come at the portaL Divers 

///» see wondrous sights at the 

bottom of the sea, but, after 



56 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

all, not more beautiful than those we see on the 
surface. 

The alternation of rock with sand and an occa- 
sional headland where woods rise above smooth 
pastures at a short distance from the shore form 
the most attractive kind of coast, though there 
are those that are bolder and grander. Cape 
Ann is a good type of the class, and, take it all 
in all, the North Shore has no superior, though 
no part of the New England seaboard is wanting 
in agreeable features of its own. A long, wide, 
level sweep of hard, white sand is a perpetual 
delight, particularly for the fanatical bather, but 
its glare is nearly intolerable in the middle of a 
cloudless clay, and one willingly seeks the nooks 
that abound among the gray barnacled granite 
chaos that re-echoes the salute of the sounding 
main. In such a spot the ebb and flow of the 
tides seems doubly rapid and mysterious. Pen- 
insulas become islands, and islands vanish, as 
the eager waters climb, swirling in sombre cran- 
nies, retreating only to advance higher. The 
flood tide gives the neater aspect of affairs, but 
low tide is richer in matters for study, and un- 



BY THE SHORE. 



57 



covers a wealth of colors in brown and yellow 
sea-weed and red rock and blue mud and bed 
of vivid eel-grass. It is interesting to watch 
the work of the salt water and its creatures 
upon the neutral zone betwixt high and low 
water marks ; to walk over countless pebbles 




polished smooth as pearls, of forms more varied 
than the art of man might invent, and of colors 
dull and bright to rival gems of purest ray 
serene ; treasures which the children, more wise 
than we, collect and value as if they were the 
peers of the Koh-i-noor diamond ; to inhale the 
dank odor of the kelp, uprooted from its deep 
home and flung upon the sands to be devoted to 



58 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



the most ignoble uses ; to startle to wriggling 
life the myriad little dwellers in the warm 
shallows ; to shake the well-knit cerulean ooze, 
whence shoots in a thin stream the Jet tV can, of 
the clam ; to mark the gradual encroachment of 
barnacles and slime and rock-weed by which 
the sea writes its careless signature upon its 




conquests. What is there, of all things, that is 
not, sooner or later, washed ashore on a sea- 
beach ? There are whole communities upon our 
coast subsisting, a good part of the year round, 
upon the sad business of wrecking ; and I have 
heard of a British brig which came ashore in 
Maine, being prematurely abandoned by the 



BY THE SHORE. 59 

crew, which was "cleaned out" by the wreckers 
in a night, while the sailors were hospitably 
entertained at the houses of the honest toilers 
of the sea. Many innocent-looking fishermen 
live less upon, their ostensible catch than upon 
the more or less lawful flotsam and jetsam com- 
ing their way. Dwellers inland can have but a 
faint idea of the amount of "plunder" fetched 
ashore by almost every tide, even in pleasant 
weather, on certain favored shores. The lives 
of some lighthouse keepers would possibly be a 
trifle monotonous if it were not for this source 
of excitement ; but think of a day which yielded 
one twenty-pound tub of butter (in good condi- 
tion) ; one straw mattress (suspected and turned 
afloat again) ; one huge tree trunk direct from 
South America or the Antilles, riddled with 
thousands of worm-holes ; one section of a ma- 
hogany cabin table, with a finely carved leg ; 
one empty beer bottle; a part of a jointed fish 
pole ; enough wood to light fires for a week 
in easterly weather; and a broken book-cover 
with the following remnant of a title: — 



60 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

Voy 

OF 
SCHOO 

Eliza J 
Richard Cogge 

OF 

New 

FROM 
1789 TO 

What voyages the schooner Eliza Jane sailed 
between 1789 and the year of her demise may 
be imagined only, for the fragment of binding 
contains no pages of the narrative which once 
filled the volume. No doubt her bones lie rot- 
ting on some foreign coast, and her master's 
fill a peaceful Yankee grave within view of the 
blue water. The deeds of both may be sur- 
mised. He was a big, bluff, hearty man, was 
Captain Richard ; a mighty drinker of Medford 
rum ; a terror to English merchantmen in the 
war of 181 2 ; and I warrant you he fetched 
more than one prize into port in the brave 
days of old, when schooners of two hundred 
and fifty tons used to go 'round the Horn, and 



BY THE SHORE. 6 1 

privateers no bigger than our Puritans and 
Mayflowers of to-day would chase and board 
and capture British ships right under the noses 
of their frigates. I do not cite the list of 
things picked up alongshore because of their 
great value, though there are worse finds than 
a tub of butter, — A i, "gilt-edged" Vermont 
butter, worth at least thirty cents a pound, — 
but mainly because things thrown up by the 
chances of wind, tide, and current on the 
beach are so suggestive, having histories and 
a look of having travelled far, many of them, 
and of having seen strange sights and passed 
through odd vicissitudes. Most of them, too, 
are incomplete, and such tales as they tell are 
very sketchy. One has to supply a good deal 
of the color for one's self. Still, the yarn of the 
carved table-leg would, if written out properly, 
be very interesting. So you see the light- 
keeper's time does not hang heavily on his 
hands : far from it. The difference in impor- 
tance between his daytime occupations and 
the duties of a bank president or a newspaper 
editor is purely arbitrary : a matter of mere 



62 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

convention. At night, it is needless to say, 
he holds the destinies of so many husbands, 
brothers, fathers, and sons in his hands, and 
his responsibility is so great and so well borne, 
that he has passed into literature as an example 
of fidelity to duty. 

The sanitary advantages of living by the sea- 
shore in the summer are now so well under- 
stood, especially by parents who wish their 
children to grow up well and strong, that it 
is only a question of time for the New England 
water-front to be lined in its entire length with 
houses, cottages, and hotels. Newport is, and 
probably will be always, our most elegant coast 
resort. Uncommonly well favored by nature, 
man has seconded instead of masking the orig- 
inal beauties of a picturesque locality rich in 
historic associations. Cooper's " Red Rover " 
and Higginson's " Malbone " and " Oldport 
Days " contain many pages of great interest 
respecting this summer metropolis of wealth 
and fashion. Henry James's " International 
Episode" also gives an amusing glimpse of 
life and society there as seen through an Eng- 



BY THE SHORE. 



65 



lish eye-glass. Martha's Vineyard offers a curi- 
ous contrast to such a place as Newport ; and 
Nahant, which Tom Appleton called cold roast 
Boston, has a character all its own. The most 
beautiful harbors of our coast are those of New- 
port, Gloucester, New London, Eastport, Boston, 
and Portland. Hunt's painting of Gloucester 




harbor has been made widely known by Stephen 
Parrish's etching after it. It was not more than 
a sketch, done at one sitting, but the effect was 
happy. Speaking of Gloucester, every one who 
likes a well-told, pathetic story should read Eliz- 
abeth Stuart Phelps's " Madonna of the Tubs." 
It makes fish — and codfish at that — seem 



66 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

rather too dear, to think of the number of 
widows and orphans left in Gloucester every 
year by the cruelty of the sea. Just around 
the tip of Cape Ann lies that great stretch 
of dazzling white sand called Ipswich Beach, 
making away to the north. The picture of it, 
by W. L. Picknell, belonging to the Boston 
Museum of Fine Arts, is naked truth itself, — 
the very breath of nature. If this were a book 
of places, as perhaps it ought to be, I would 
like nothing better than to describe the Isles 
of Shoals, Nantucket, Provincetown, Greenwich, 
Narragansett Pier, Watch Hill, Bath, New Bed- 
ford, Rye, York, Scituate, Campobello, Grand 
Menan, Stonington, Bristol, Hampton, Ply- 
mouth, Marblehead, Salem, Portsmouth, Man- 
chester-by-the-Sea, Beverly, Swampscott, Lynn, 
Cohasset, and the many other charming spots 
— islands, ports, and summer resorts, some of 
them less known but not a whit less attractive 
and interesting — that embroider the eastern 
and southern frontiers of blessed New England. 



\ 





THE ABANDONED FARMHOUSE. 



THERE are many abandoned farmhouses in 
New England, but the particular one to 
which I wish to refer is situated on a hill-top, 
not more than three miles from a city, yet in 
one of the loneliest localities that can be imag- 
ined. No other house stands near, and the 
place is well wooded. The house commands a 
fine prospect in two directions. Towards the 
east, looking over the belt of thick woods which 
girdles the hill, lies the town, so embowered in 
trees that its church spires only and its tallest 
mill chimneys rise into view. Beyond it is the 

67 



68 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

red face of a steep hill, and, at the right, the masts 
of vessels in the unseen harbor ; towards the 
west, orchards, pasture lands, and fields of grain, 
a fat and sleek agricultural basin, evidently the 
property of the farmer whose multitudinous 
barns and granaries cover the crest of the neigh- 
boring hill more than half a mile distant, the 
house being so small in comparison with the 
barns that it would scarcely be noticed at the 
first glance. The views are pleasant and wide ; 
that towards the town, panoramic, reminding one 
of an old-fashioned landscape by Thomas Cole 
or Asher B. Durand ; that towards the country, 
sunny, cheerful, agrestic. This hill-top must 
have been a beautiful home when it was inhab- 
ited. Why was the old house deserted ? I do 
not know whether the old people died without 
issue, or whether the children "went to New 
York " to starve in an attic ; and I have never 
asked the neighbors. It is quite as well to leave 
these matters to speculation. No doubt the in- 
mates were worthy commonplace folk whose 
histories would add no glimmer of romance to 
the spot, already sufficiently melancholy in its 



THE ABANDONED FARMHOUSE. 



69 



solitude and decay. No sound comes up to the 
hill-top to-day save the busy, hot rattle of a dis- 
tant mowing-machine, and the occasional roar 
of a locomotive from afar. Neither mowing- 
machine nor locomotive existed when this house 




was built. There was such a thing as silence in 
those days. 

The house has, or rather had, two stories and 
a small wing, which was probably added some 
time after the building of the main part of the 
edifice. In the centre of the structure there was 
a huge chimney, having open fire-places on three 



■JO ARCADIAN DAYS. 

sides. The rooms were low, but large, well 
lighted, and pleasant. The cellar extended under 
all parts of the building, and now serves as its 
sepulchre ; for day by day morsels of plaster, of 
wood, of brick, and of stone drop one by one 
through the gaping floors and form a mass of 
debris where once the cider and the apples were 
hoarded. The doorstep was a great, flat, unhewn 
stone, slightly worn in the middle, where many 
feet have trod. The window sashes and the 
doors have all gone, and boards have been nailed 
up in places to keep the rain and wind from the 
tramps who have slept on the floor of the best 
room. At the rear, the whole wall is in a state 
of complete ruin, and a coach and four might be 
driven right into the kitchen, through the hid- 
eous breach which grows wider with each tem- 
pest. The capacious ovens and the spit where 
the housewife was wont to cook in the generous 
style of yore are the sole relics of the departed 
occupants. The greater part of the floor has 
caved in ; that which is left is undulating, and 
shakes unpleasantly when walked upon. The 
falling plaster has left the laths bare here and 



THE ABANDONED FARMHOUSE. 71 

there, like the flesh leaving the bones that have 
upheld it. Steadily the work of decay and dis- 
solution goes on ; the rain and the heat rot ; the 
frost cracks, and the wind racks and tears ; the 
days of the poor old house are numbered. In 
the full sunlight of a perfect summer day it has 
a sad dignity, and, among its lovely surround- 
ings, a beauty of its own, which belongs to all 
things old, decrepit, forlorn, and soon to be 
gone. But in a September gale, as I have seen 
it, when the breath of the storm was boisterous, 
and the voice of the southeast wind filled the 
woods with strange cries, under sombre skies 
which sent down torrents of rain, the venerable 
dwelling was a grewsome place. Under such 
circumstances it would not need a very active 
fancy to conjure up all sorts of spectres in its 
deserted chambers, particularly at those times 
when a loosened board, swayed by a gust of 
more than ordinary force, beat a ghostly reveille 
against the rafters. 

All around the house are rank growths of 
bushes, weeds, and wild flowers. Near the 
front door is a rose vine, and in their seasons 



72 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 




one may gather rasp- 
berries, blackberries, 
gooseberries, cur- 
rants, close by the little wing. The yard is 
full of milkweed, and at intervals stand apple- 
trees of considerable age, some of which bear 
good fruit. The old well is dismantled, and 
planks cover it up. Not far from the rear 
of the house there is a magnificent oak ; and 
farther still a dense wood of chestnuts, hicko- 
ries, and larches, without undergrowth, worthy 
to be the pleasure park of a royal residence. I 
have never seen any living things except cows 



THE ABANDONED FARMHOUSE. 



73 



and birds enjoying the usufruct of this unten- 
anted domain, where one is tempted to "lose 




and neglect the creeping hours of time." Some 
day a wealthy man of taste will take this estate, 
and, in the place of the ruined farmhouse, will 
build a new home for himself and his children, 
will lay out walks and drives, fence in his 
grounds, and make a little Fontainebleau or 
Saint Cloud of this solitude. Lawn-mowers, 
instead of vagrant cattle, will crop the turf; 
brilliant exotics will bloom under glass where 



74 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



now the lurid hollyhock, the decorous hydrangea, 
the "dear common flower" that gilds the fields 
and byways with such an honest yellow, and the 
still more common field daisy, grow in untutored 
luxuriance ; shining equipages will roll up to the 
doors over well-kept roads where to-day a rick- 
ety farmer's wagon creeps by with the rattle 
and squeak of vehicular senility. Carriages, by 
the way, have done much to destroy the roman- 
ticism which flourished when men travelled on 
horseback ; and I doubt whether a solitary 
bicycler, even at twilight, would have the same 
interest for novel-readers as the cloaked cavalier 
ascending the hill in the rain. What a scene 
for a story of adventure and intrigue ! Would 
that Hawthorne might have known the place : 
he would have made it immortal. This fit 
theatre for a drama of human passions reminds 
me, though different, of a little picture by Ruys- 
dael, with figures by Wouvermans, in the Bos- 
ton Museum of Fine Arts. The subject is a 
ruined farmhouse, where a party of travellers 
have halted to rest and breathe their horses. 
The painting is rather dark, and the figures are 



THE ABANDONED FARMHOUSE. 



75 



very small, but it is astonishing how complete 
is the unity of the persons and animals with the 
landscape : all being enveloped in the same 
air and illuminated by the same light. An in- 
explicable impression emanates from the canvas, 




of vague romance : it is as intangible as the 
odor of faded violets, but inspires a personal 
interest in the fortunes of the horseman, and 
hangs the work forever on the line in memory's 
picture-gallery. 




' l 



,.;*■ 



IN FIELD AND MEADOW. 



HAYMAKING, apart from its utilitarian 
aspects, which need not concern us, is 
from beginning to end one of the most pictu- 
resque of the farmer's multifarious occupations. 
At first there is the great field full of tall, ripe 
grass, itself a handsome sight as it waves in 
the breeze and shines in the sun. The hot and 
cloudless morning comes when the metallic 
drone of the mowing-machine announces the 
downfall of the savory crop. No sound is more 
7 6 



IN FIELD AND MEADOW. JJ 

intimately associated with the warm season in 
the country than this drowsy music of the 
knives, as there is no odor more thoroughly 
rustic than that of the new-mown hay. Now 
the sweating steeds toil steadily from corner to 
corner of the diminishing square of living ver- 
dure, and the long ranks of timothy and herds- 
grass fall like brave battalions before the deadly 
charge of a superior foe. Next appears that 
prosaic successor to Whittier's "Maud Muller " 
— the horse-rake, which so easily performs its 
function that " The Rake's Progress " seems a 
veritable play. Then the laborers with hand- 
rakes swiftly heap the sun-cured haycocks at 
regular intervals to await the wain. It is com- 
mon now for the signs of a shower to be shown 
in the north, "to spur their expedition," and 
all hands must work in lively fashion to get the 
last load home before the rain falls. As Troyon 
knew full well, a huge load of hay drawn by an 
ox team is an object to make a noble picture 
of. There was a delightful painting of a hay- 
making scene by Julien Dupre in the Paris 
Salon of 1 88 1. Blue-black clouds save a broad 



78 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

hint of coming wet, and a group of men in 
blouses, and women in blue cotton gowns, with 
gaudy colored head-dresses, hastily raked the 
hay and pitched it upon the already enormous 
cartload which formed an effective mass of 
golden brown against the lowering sky. It is 
not often that women participate in the hay- 
making in New England, and the men would 
sooner suffer almost any indignity than wear 
the uniform of a peasantry, no matter how 
comfortable or becoming it might be. 

Into the generous portals of the big barn 
the fragrant load is hauled in time, and then, 
hardest and hottest task of all, the rustling hay 
is stowed in the mows in immense forkfuls, 
and "mowed " {i.e. distributed evenly) in all the 
shadowy, dusty, stifling, cobwebbed recesses of 
its winter quarters. This done, the heated 
laborers may cease, the day's work being ended, 
with the exception of the " chores." In the 
half-night of the cattle-sheds, the cows, just 
driven home from the pasture by a barefooted 
boy, stand blandly chewing their cuds and 
switching off the flies with their never-quiet 



IN FIELD AND MEADOW. 8 1 

tails, as they wait to be milked. The oxen 
now are turned into the barn-yard to be fed 
and watered ; they are superb there in repose, 
as the light falls on their lustrous flanks, and 
Troyon himself might feel his incompetency 
to cope with such royal hues and majestic 
masses. The horses must be fed, watered, 
bedded : there they stand in the twilight of 
the stable, as Gericault represented a row of 
them — the bay, the black, the roan — rear view, 
every line speaking of life. The pigs' inap- 
peasable appetites are to be mitigated by some 
gallons of swill ; the hens are to have their 
hour to cluck, to scramble, to peck, to fight, 
to greedily grab their fill of corn ; and so the 
cheerful routine of the farm goes on. 

What a charming landscape is framed soberly 
by the great open doorways of the red barn ! 
Across the dusty highway, bordered by wide 
strips of glossy turf rich in clover, the apple 
orchard arrays its aisles and bowers of green 
shadow, and its grotesque arabesques of gnarled 
limbs, down the long gradual slope to where 
the bis: meadow lies. The meadow ! there is 



82 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



something sunny, large, and calm about the 
very word. Every farmer has a favorite meadow 
in some corner of his domain, known as " The 
Meadow," or qualified according to circumstances 
as the Big, the Long, the Hillside, the Swamp, 
etc. From year to year there is very little 
change in the appearance of the meadow. The 



t&aztma 



r.v _ /^nrfftfnWfap*^ 





..'••".. 



boy who drives home the cattle becomes a man, 
and, led by the auri sacra fames, goes away ; 
but, whether it be in Chicago, Valparaiso, Rome, 
Calcutta, Cape Town, or Melbourne, that he 
elects to pass his last clays on earth, let me ask 
if you think that he ever forgets the meadow ; 
the spring in the corner where the willows 
grow, where the moist earth is marked by the 



IN FIELD AND MEADOW. 



83 



hoofprints of the cows, where the low stone-wall 
makes such a pleasant seat in the shade, where 
the call of the quail, — "Bob White! More 




wet!" — the note of the blackbird, the song of 
the thrush, and the zigzag flight of a thousand 
butterflies are but memories of long ago, that 
revive with a strange persistency and sweet- 



84 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

ness in the wanderer's tough old heart ? The 
rough rocky slopes, the sandy soil, the rugged 
faces of the hills, yield but a lean supply in 
comparison with the inexhaustible crops of the 
rich Western lands ; but how infinitely supe- 
rior are our horizons, albeit they profit only 
our eyes. However much of a clod a man may 
be, he perceives such things as these, often 
without knowing it : they are felt in the blood. 
Constant usage may dull, but not extinguish, 
the faculty of observation ; and it is not true of 
our country population, whatever may be said 
of the European, that it has no soul for any- 
thing higher than the petty material interests 
of a narrow life of toil. A man may indeed live 
among fine pictures all his life, like the police- 
man in the National Gallery, and yet be not an 
authority upon the fine arts ; but Nature's lan- 
guage is more universal, and her eloquence is 
more readily understood of all men, so that the 
poorest rustic is not so poor but he receives 
impressions which, had he the means of trans- 
lating them, would go to swell the world's fund 
of poetry. Millet made his peasants pathetic fig- 



IX FIELD AND MEADOW. 85 

ures ; but we have no peasant class ; and surely 
his lot is not so pitiable who lives outdoors, is 
never idle, has no fear of want, and can possess 
those homely joys which are, after all, the best, 
the most lasting, and the most wholesome. In 
our complicated cockney civilization, the most 
dignified personality is his who stands apart, 
with a background of landscape. He is not 
bending over a ticker to read the latest stock 
quotations ; nor pursuing the gold-bug, Tantalus- 
like, from railroad to railroad and from steamer 
to steamer ; neither is he feeding a printing- 
press with horrors and nastiness ; he is not in 
war nor politics ; and, for all that he is not, he is 
entitled to our most sincere admiration. Millet 
saw that the peasant was most like the ancient 
men, because his life was simple and his char- 
acter had repose ; this is why the rough, stolid 
rustic, in his setting of fields and meadows, 
has something in him that reminds us of the 
strength, the soundness, the freedom, and the 
unconscious dignity of classic models in old art. 
Next to the manly calling of the sailor stands 
that of the farmer; in both, man and nature are 



86 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



forever tete-a-tete. Contact with the elements 
is what humanity needs, and not to be hived in 
mills, stores, and offices. More outdoor life, 
and fewer physicians ! More sun and wind, and 
less physic ! 



i* » 



. _ ■■• .- ; to'.<«i*te5*#SE 



iff 






Ufa'** ''t^r. ' 



^ 



'm^^' 1 '' 



"Who doth ambition shun, 
And loves to live i' the sun, 
Seeking the food he eats, 
And pleased with what he gets, 
Come hither, come hither, come hither; 
Here shall he see 
No enemy 
But winter and rough weather." 



The most delightful description of country 
life that I know of is that in Blackmore's 



IN FIELD AND .MEADOW. 87 

"Lorna Doone," the hero of which is a superb 
specimen of the olcl-fashioned race of farmers. 
There are some fine pictures of agricultural 
life also in Hardy's " Far from the Madding 
Crowd"; and I would be at a loss to say where 
more poetical prose could be found than in some 
of Andre Theuriet's stories of rural France. 
Once in a while George Sand gives you a 
splendid word-picture of some favorite scenery. 
William Black in his earliest works was fond 
of painting landscapes with his pen, but he 
rather overloads his colors, and approaches 
perilously near the chromo. Old Dumas could 
be great in almost any province, and occasion- 
ally he clashes off a landscape sketch of wonder- 
ful reality, as witness the account of a storm 
among the mountains in the opening pages 
of " Le Trou de l'Enfer," though perhaps you 
will say that sort of scene-painting is of the 
theatre, and is intended only as a background 
for the figures that strut upon the stage. Well, 
who has not seen remarkably fine landscapes, 
pastoral as well as romantic, in the scenery of 
the playhouse ? And what is landscape in its 



88 



ORCADIAN DAYS. 



widest sense but a vast background for human- 
ity ? — a background of infinite variety, gran- 
deur, and beauty, worthy of its purpose, but 
forever secondary, for the reason that nothing 
can be so interesting to men as Man. 





mmMMmsm^t 



THE THUNDER STORM. 



BROTHER to the western cyclone, the 
thunder storm, usually more sedate in 
its demeanor, is not always less harmful. The 
almanac makes but small account of what it 
calls local storms, yet these events are fright- 
ful enough in New England during the dog- 
days to scare thousands of people each season, 
killing a few, maiming others, and doing a sum 

S 9 



9 o 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



of damage to real property which, if calculated 
in round figures, would make an appalling to- 
tal. My meteorological vade mecutn informs 
me that thunder storms are "apt to occur" 
wherever warm, moist, ascending currents meet 
with cold, descending currents ; twelve or thir- 
teen hours in advance they are announced 
by a stratus of cumulus having innumerable 
tufts or turrets on the top ; they are " most 
likely to occur " between the hours of three and 
four o'clock in the afternoon ; and it is the 
theory of the weather-wise that when the 
cumuli appear during the heat of the day, and 
pass away in the evening, continued fair weather 
may be expected ; but when they increase rap- 
idly, sink into the lower part of the atmosphere, 
and remain as the evening approaches, rain is 
at hand. These are a small part of the great 
system of signs which enables close observers 
to make good guesses as to the weather. It 
is certain that, though the cumuli, commonly 
known as cotton-bales or thunder-heads, seldom 
fail to put in their appearance in the lower part 
of the sky during the hot days of July and 



THE THUNDER STORM. 91 

August, they are not the infallible forerunners 
of rain by any means. These are the hand- 
somest of clouds, and assume the greatest 
variety of forms and colors, especially towards 
night. Nothing more celestially innocent, peace- 
ful, beatific, in the skies, than yon bank of 
splendid gray vapor, sailing slowly above the 
horizon, assuming from moment to moment a 
hundred indescribable shapes, alive with subtle 
lights ; a vision of purity and grace and leisure. 
Domes and towers, summits of snow shining aloft 
like Pyrenean peaks, range upon range of intan- 
gible Alps, glorious in their inaccessible altitude, 
they move in state like airy gods, glow with 
golden and rosy fires, and cause the heart of 
man to leap up when he beholds them. Who 
would suppose that havoc lurked in the bosom 
of so much loveliness ? 

It is a sultry afternoon. The air is lifeless, 
stifling, torrid. The wind has died out, and a 
complete calm broods over the simmering fields 
and the glassy water. The flies bite with un- 
common malignancy. The trees and flowers 
droop, as if waiting for something. As the 



9 2 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



afternoon draws on, there is a prolonged distant 
rumbling, now broken by a louder accent, now 
dying away in a subdued growl. Sometimes the 
far sound of the thunder will be almost inces- 
sant for one or two hours before the storm 




comes near enough to make its lightnings visi- 
ble. Then in the northwest rises a portentous 
blue-black bank of clouds, spreading rapidly and 
steadily over the tenderer blue of the open sky, 
sending its skirmish-line forward in brisk puffs 
of wind to relieve the heavy and oppressive 
calm that hansfs over the earth in front of the 



THE THUNDER STORM. 93 

tempest. The foremost edge of the revolving 
cloud-bank is a long, crescent line, broken into 
shorter scallops, embroidered with a woolly gray 
vapor, curling and wreathing like smoke in 
minor circles as it comes. Beneath this busy 
advance-guard extends the dense, fiat face of 
dark-blue rain-cloud, now at intervals seared by 
the zigzag signature of the lightning bolt ; and 
finally beneath the storm's farthest skirt, a 
brazen gleam from the sun-touched west. The 
measure of the dance grows more tempestuous. 
Now the smoky tufts of the storm's high cor- 
nice are whirling overhead. The first large 
drops of rain patter noisily on the roof. The 
first full-fledged blast of the furious squall lays 
low the trembling treetops, rends here a sapling 
and there a feeble branch, and sends a panic- 
stricken host of loose leaves trooping through 
the air. 

Now shorten all sail, skipper, and stand by to 
luff ! Shut windows, housewife, and make all 
snug alow and aloft ! Bend patiently your head, 
belated traveller, and draw your cloak closer ! 
To your coops, pretty chicks ! For here it 
comes. 



94 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



With a stentorian, 
exultant roar the pa- 
rent blast is upon 
us, and all the air 
is vocal with the 
shrill holiday chorus 
of his fiend-family,j 
madly rollicking in 
the trees, savagely 
whipping the vines 
and shrubs, yelling 
down the chimneys, 
and piping a dia- 
bolic dance tune all 
about the house. Down 
falls the solid, slanting flood 
of rain, with its splendid diapason of 
battle, no dainty drizzle, but a drenching, 
drowning downpour, a soaking, cats -and -dogs 
torrent, finding instantly all leaks, washing out 
highways, swelling springs to brooks, brooks to 
creeks, and creeks to rivers, flattening the fair 
growing grain, undermining culverts, bursting 
dams, submerging cities, and making merry over 




THE THUNDER STORM. 



95 



its carnival of moist mischief with a wild wet joy. 
Above even its mighty uproar laughs the deep- 
chested wind ; the thunder god claps his colossal 
hands in Olympian glee ; and myriad echoes 
among the clouds send back the applause of 
the elements in long-drawn reverberations, as 
it were the rolling of titanic drums calling the 
powers of the upper air to mortal combat. The 
lightning seems to draw nearer. 'Tis a fear- 
ful guest, that comes unbidden and strikes 
home with merciful speed, — Death's fleetest 
agent. Bolts fall in forked lines of blinding 
brilliancy, shooting shafts of infernal fabrica- 
tion at that scarred old target, the earth, rend- 
ing the atmosphere into fiery shreds and sec- 
tions, running a race with old Time and 
beating him, eating up the darkness, and etch- 
ing crazy sketches on the shield of the night- 
black heavens. 

What a little creature a man is now ! how 
helpless, how overawed ! The figure in this 
landscape is a petty thing, and wishes it were 
smaller yet. 

By almost imperceptible degrees the crisis of 



96 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

the storm passes and its rage abates. The 
downpour dwindles to a fine, thin rain. The 
winds wail more weakly. The thunder strug- 
gles and howls in its reluctant retreat. Belated 



^4^5^ 



lightnings dart fiercely through the sweetened 
air. In a moment the sun will burst forth in a 
rift of the clouds, and set the million drops of 
water on leaves and grass to shining, not like 
diamonds, as some poets would have it, but 
much more heartily than any such heartless 
stones. Foul puddles clear up their mirror- 
faces to reflect the blue sky that will soon be 
uncurtained. Step outdoors and inhale the 



THE THUNDER STORM. 97 

freshness of the well-washed world. The birds 
are fairly outdoing themselves in the exuberance 
of their carols. From the trees and bushes and 
from the eaves of the house there is a smart 
and rhythmical dripping. The rain has passed ; 
all is clean and cool ; Nature emerges from her 
bath, sparkling, refreshed, rejuvenated. 

Over in the south the storm can be seen pur- 
suing its progress out to sea. It is grand to 
watch the sight-outrunning lightning in its 
gambols over the water, now that it has retired 
to a safe distance. The sun sets, night falls, 
and in the darkness of the evening the specta- 
cle becomes more vivid and marvellous. A 
vast rack of cumulus clouds, upheaved in bulg- 
ing masses, with towering alabaster domes, 
overhangs the horizon, and stands out momen- 
tarily in perfect distinctness as "Jove's light- 
nings, the precursors o' the dreadful thunder- 
claps," illuminate it with a pink light. The 
play of the flashes is almost incessant, for 
several storms are raging out there at once. 
The rosy lines leap from dome to dome, or, 
more often, dive from some lofty cloud-summit 



98 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

into the very depths of the black ocean. Those 
flames that are borne down beyond the nearest 
clouds, and shine from their vaporous valley 
upon the second range, make its flanks appear 
like some immense canopy, through which they 
send the intense reflection of their unseen fires. 
Too far removed from the storm centre to hear 
the thunder, the spectator may sit and watch 
such a Witch's Sabbath half through the night, 
with the stars winking overhead. 

In the famous Morgan collection there was 
a splendid picture of the coming-on of a thunder 
storm. It was by Diaz. A man wearing a 
cloak was crossing a wide plain, where the rising 
wind already swept with great violence, bend- 
ing and twisting trees and bushes in its path, 
and making the traveller's farther progress a 
matter of no slight difficulty. Over a large part 
of the sky was spread a cloud-bank of inky 
bluish-black, with an undertone of coppery green, 
suggestive of tornadoes and windy ruin. The 
clouds had not the funnel-form, however, which 
is supposed to characterize the cyclone, and 
doubtless what Diaz had witnessed was nothing 



THE THUNDER STORM. IOI 

more than an effete European squall travelling 
at the moderate rate of fifteen and one-half 
miles an hour, instead of an American storm 
which has an average speed of twenty-six and 
one-tenth miles an hour. Isabey has described a 
stormy day with much skill, too, in his "Embark- 
ation," a work full of nerve, conveying an 
admirable impression of " dirty" weather. Hunt 
undertook to paint a thunder storm once, but 
with indifferent success ; it was not one of his 
good days. I suppose that nobody has ever illus- 
trated showery weather so faithfully as Consta- 
ble — weather which means "take your umbrella 
with you when you go out to-day," — or in 
other words, the sort of weather alluded to in 
the classic legend : — 

" Open and shet, 
The day'll be wet." 




SUNSET EFFECTS. 



WHEN the Almighty hung the sun in the 
heavens, and gave men eyes wherewith 
to see its light, he offered one capital proof of 
his kindness toward his children ; yet how few 
of them ever lift their eyes from their hideous 
ledgers long enough to observe the beauty of 
the sky, land, and sea, all animated by the ever- 
shifting sunlight, which paints silver and golden 
pictures everywhere from hour to hour, and, in 
departing from the world at night, sends up a 
chromatic hymn of praise which makes glorious 
the firmament from west to east. A world 



SUNSET EFFECTS. 



I0 3 



without light and color is not to be conceived. 
The moon is a paradox, not fit for man to live 
on. How can night be without day ? 

There is a sweet melancholy in the sunset 
hour, like that of the fall of the year, or of the 
parting of friends who hope to meet again. 
The day is ended, with its tasks, and one more 
etapc in the long march is done : a few hours' 
rest, and then on again ! The time invites 
meditation. Since man does not live by bread 
alone, the eyes should be fed as well as the stom- 
ach, and in the optical diet of each day's round, 
so full of variety, the setting of the sun may be 
regarded as the dessert, or the after-dinner cof- 
fee, which is to leave its taste longest on the 
palate of the sight. 

Though no two sunsets are exactly alike, 
there is not one of them but has some hand- 
some features in it ; as a general rule those that 
are most admired because of their extreme bril- 
liancy of coloring are even less beautiful than 
the quieter sort which often pass unnoticed. 
One reason is that a vast number of people 
dwell in towns, in valleys, or among trees, where 



104 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

they can see only a small part of the sky, and 
naturally they do not take much interest in 
what is going on up there unless it is something" 
altogether extraordinary. They will admire, 
most probably, a sunset of the sanguinary sort, 
where the clouds are dyed a blood red, as 
depicted in the well-known paintings of Mr. 
Vermilion which are all so much alike ; not that 
his pictures are untruthful, either, as pictures 
go : he saw that effect once, and has been paint- 
ing it ever since, unmindful of the fact that 
Nature's programme is eternally diversified. A 
flaming debauch of warm color, such as Dela- 
croix or Turner would have hardly dared to re- 
produce in all its riotous intensity, this just 
suited Vermilion, who, without a thought of 
difficulty, translated it into a thoroughly bour- 
geois and hopelessly prosaic picture, after a 
snug little recipe of his own, the gods not hav- 
ing made him poetical. There is less art enters 
into the making of such paintings than Aunt 
Matilda uses in the compounding of her mince- 
pies, for she varies the flavor by adding more 
or less of this or that ingredient in each batch, 



SUNSET EFFECTS. 105 

and follows no invariable rule, relying upon in- 
stinct, and taking an artist's pleasure in the 
soundness of the work ; whereas Mr. Vermilion, 
and those other mechanical painters, Messrs. 
Ultramarine and Chrome Yellow, have forgot 
the youthful inspiration which gave them their 
first start in the profession, and blindly adhere 
to established formulae for the manufacture of 
ruddy sunsets, cerulean Venices, and summer 
twilights. The worthy citizen who buys these 
ready-made mediocrities is rather pleased than 
otherwise to know that his acquisitions are so 
similar to all the rest of the trio's productions 
that visitors never fail to recognize the pater- 
nity of his treasures, and it is a comfort in these 
days to feel that one owns something genuine 
if not unique. Nor have we any right to com- 
plain, for Vermilion, Ultramarine, and Chrome 
Yellow are good fellows : and it is not wholly 
their fault that there are so many artists in the 
world still awaiting recognition in the obscurity 
of their sixth-floor-back studios. And then — 
to return to our sunsets — perhaps a part of my 
prejudice against effects of Mr. Vermilion's 



106 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

kind is literary ; certainly it is hard to find a 
novel, a poem, or a book of travel without its 
description of at least one remarkable red sun- 
set. However, there is no cheapness, thank 
Heaven ! about the real article, be it in any 
combination of the primary colors. Words and 
pictures may grow hackneyed, tiresome, and 
stale, but the things they stand for lose nothing 
by age and repetition. In Nature, says Emer- 
son, all is useful, all is beautiful. There is no 
crudity in the most brilliant of real effects, 
no fever in the warmest coloring, no excess of 
frigidity in the coolest. The atmosphere is a 
magical tonist, and never falsifies a value. 
Harmony is everywhere except on your medio- 
cre painter's palette ; yet, strangely enough, it 
is he who is forever prating about realism, as if 
photography were the highest form of pictorial 
art, and the world were dead and colorless. 
Away with a realism which has nothing real 
about it except its pretensions ; let it go the 
same way as the impressionism devoid of im- 
pressions. The truths that were good enough 
for Raphael and Correggio, for Rembrandt and 



SUNSET EFFECTS. 



IO9 



Velasquez, are good enough for us ; and we are 
free to seek them where they sought and found 
them, in the heart of Nature, without interme- 
diaries. The schools have never yet made a 
great painter, and never will. 

The handsomest part of a handsome sunset is 




often in the region of the sky farthest removed 
from the light, that is to say, the east ; although 
it is true that the whole expanse of the sky is 
likely to assist in the radiant pageant, each sec- 
tion having its own peculiar beauties, from a 
naming fiery centre outward through countless 
gradations to the last faint reflection of warm 



IIO ARCADIAN DAYS. 

color lingering on the crest of some mysterious 
low-lying cloud. My western horizon is admir- 
able, and no landscapist could see it at sundown 
without wishing to paint it. At the left is a 
village with here and there a red roof ; then a 
group of healthy cherry trees about one-eighth 
of a mile distant ; full a mile beyond is the well- 
defined ridge of a very respectable hill, crowned 
by a fine thick wood ; now fancy nearer trees in- 
tervening, and then a reach of still more distant 
hill, almost bare of trees. Two large apple- 
trees not far away lift a mass of dark foliage to 
the sky. To the extreme right the crest of a 
gentle slope makes away in the middle distance 
to the northward. These lines are suave and 
smiling, but not insipid. There is something 
very distinctive and piquant about the shape of 
the bluish-green wood in the first distance ; it is 
" backed like a weasel " ; and that is where the 
sun goes down. When it goes down in a gilt- 
edged edition, leaving the sky clothed in an 
effulgent livery of amber and brass, that mass 
of trees is full as sombre, impenetrable, and 
dusky as any ever painted by Daubigny. When 



SUNSET EFFECTS. 



I I I 



it goes down from out a clear field of pale 
greenish blue, and leaves a film of dusty purple 
over it, with slate-colored cirri trailing above, 
only their lower edges tinted by faintest pink, 
and when the clear sky underneath changes to 




luminous pale gold lightly washed with a coppery 
bronze, as the clouds darken and spread, till up 
towards the zenith their drab patches relieve 
depths of fast-fading rose, then, shades of great 
Rousseau, you are here ! There are times when 



I 1 2 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

the humor of the sunset is all soft and mellow 
and full of sober amiability, when the sky seems 
to melt away in a golden mist, and the level 
rays of light touching the western slope of a 
field are like a benediction on the happy earth ; 
the commonest things bathed in this sweet flood 
are transformed to objects of beauty. It was so 
that Claude Lorrain would see his world. Then 
comes a day of storm, and the heavy rain clouds 
darken all the landscape, till at evening the west 
suddenly runs up its signal of clearing weather, 
and in a twinkling the sad gray curtains are 
whisked from before the gates of the Occident 
in time to reveal an orange and green chamber 
of more than royal magnificence in which the 
sun has gone to bed. The other night, a huge 
array of slate-gray clouds had been piled up over 
there by some aerial architect, with horizontal 
strata projected on purpose to catch reflections 
of fiery scarlet in long bars of unutterable bril- 
liancy. It was, perhaps, a bed of celestial cin- 
ders, glowing with their last life, the debris of 
the day's full fire. Many a sunset has flamed 
and faded over my horizon that words are but 



SUNSET EFFECTS. 



113 



poor means of sketching ; some were portents, 
and some were prodigies, and others still were 
as a mother's good-night kiss. They are, all in 
all, as near indescribable as anything on earth 
may be. We have our little stock of phrases, 
our metaphors, and what then ? Are all the 
gems known to the jeweller equal to the colors 



r~ 




in the sky which we hope to praise by compar- 
ing with them ? It is a sheer waste of powder 
to fire volleys of adjectives which, from the con- 



114 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

stant abuse of them, have come to mean any- 
thing or nothing. Is it not rather sacrilegious 
to speak of the finest sights in life in terms 
which the school-girl applies to her caramels ? 

Art has a curious progressive effect on the 
serious mind : at the outset it seems to respect 
nothing, and it ends by becoming a religion. 
So a work of art is something done in love and 
faith : and because these exalted feelings can- 
not be well counterfeited, their absence being 
easily detected, the world refuses to be moved 
by a picture which has cost its maker no real 
emotion. To look upon an actual scene and 
say, That is like a painting by my friend, this is 
indeed a genuine tribute to genius ; for the art 
of which Nature strongly reminds us must be 
well born and nobly inspired. 



jMSiK^^'::: '" - ■■■■■■;• 7V;fl8 



^ 



* s I 






IN THE WOODS. 

FEW men really love solitude, and this is one 
of the reasons that it is pleasant to be in 
the woods, where, although alone, one is never 
solitary. They are sham hermits who take up 
their abode in cabins in the forest ; for in such a 
home there must be plenty of company. It is a 
brave kingdom, where the inhabitants have their 
music for nothing, " sounds, and sweet airs, that 
give delight and hurt not." The free spirit 
of the woods seems somehow to penetrate the 
least poetical natures. Men go down in Maine 

"5 



Il6 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

to hunt and fish, and mayhap bring down better 
game than they seek. The tuneful voice of 
Nature is continually audible in the shadowy 
solitudes. The lonely glen, and wild rocky dell, 
the high canopy of moving boughs, the solemn 
fastnesses where the light of day is tempered to 
a perpetual dusk, school the eyes to quiet con- 
templation, and solace the restless mind with 
balmy day-dreams. Sky and distance are ban- 
ished from the scene, and all is either foreground 
or mystery. 

Mystery ! that is the name for this leafy city, 
whose tangled avenues begin nowhere and lead 
to the unknown. The fancy roves in a laby- 
rinth of bosky byways, now charmed, now awed. 
There is no Oriental rug to equal the pine 
needles, dead twigs, and fallen leaves that strew 
the fragrant, endless alleys of the forest ; it is a 
carpet elastic under the tread, grateful to the 
nostrils, and of a tone and pattern that never 
weary the sight, — brown beneath, and diapered 
with the exquisitely delicate shapes of ferns 
and mosses in many shades of green, with 
weeds which deserve more honorable names. 



IN THE WOODS. 



II 9 



The gray of granite boulders makes cool spots 
in this harmonious field, flecked by moving 
points of sunlight, and variegated by a thousand 
caprices of brier and vine, bush and sapling. 
No two square yards are like, but all are in per- 
fect accord. The light is colored a golden 
green by the multitude of reflections from the 
foliage ; it is the despair of literal painters, and 
no picture is adequate to suggest its peculiar 
quality except in a remote manner when the 
mid-summer sun hangs high and vegetation is 
at its fullest life. 

Our trees are being felled at such a rate that 
the grand old woods that once covered a large 
part of the country are already, with a few 
exceptions, things of the past, and in time we 
may be obliged to go to Europe or to South 
America to see a forest worthy of the name. 
Such a wood as that of Fontainebleau, easily 
accessible from Paris, would undoubtedly "pay" 
in the neighborhood of large towns here, but 
though we have cut down scores of them, it is 
not so easy to make them. Shall Americans in 
the future have to so to the suburbs of Paris 



120 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

and London when they wish to see a good bit 
of woods ? Let Boston at least earn a new 
title to distinction (it is time) by guarding from 
real-estate vandalism the wild tract known as 
the Middlesex Fells, which, improving with age 
like wine, if preserved in all its integrity, will 
be the finest ornament of a district which does 
not lack natural charms, and which can be 
spoiled only by the vulgarity and greed of the 
citizens. Indeed, one must travel far now to 
find more picturesque horizons than those of 
historic Middlesex County, with her dense, luxu- 
riant woods and her rolling purple hills. Wood- 
man, spare that tree ! As the amiable M. Oudi- 
not has said, " Celui qui aime vraiment la nature 
ne peut guere etre qu'un honnete homme " ; 
and surely he who loves trees cannot be all 
wrong-hearted. 

It is no easy matter nowadays in the greater 
part of this New England to get lost in the 
woods. At the moment the explorer is con- 
vinced that he has penetrated to the holy of 
holies, and contemplates taking formal posses- 
sion of the heart of the place, a stronger light 



IN THE WOODS. 121 

breaks upon his way, and a few steps bring him 
to the farther edge of the wood, within view of 
a barn and a haystack. A few repetitions of 
this experience are enough to extinguish all 
sense of personal heroism in the adventurer. 
However, the Pemigewasset forest in New 
Hampshire may be considered a very respect- 
able wilderness for these times ; at all events 
when a party of us tramped through it there 
were no paths, tracks, nor "blazes," for some 
thirty miles, and to find the way it was cus- 
tomary to follow the sinuous courses of the 
streams. In this virgin forest, as we liked to 
call it, everything was entirely natural and 
inviolate ; there were no traces of human beings 
except two deserted, ill-smelling wood-cutters' 
cabins at far intervals. The general aspect of 
these trackless wilds was not widely different 
from that of a snug little wood of ten acres, in 
the centre of which one may momentarily fancy 
the nearest house a thousand miles away ; yet 
the sense of hearing testified otherwise. There 
were no sounds save those that might be heard 
here by the savage before Columbus broke the 



122 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

egg, — the birds' careless improvisations, the 
jovial confidences of the brooks, the light foot- 
fall of some invisible animal, the soft rustling 
of the foliage far overhead, the fall of a dead 
limb ; and, at dead of night, when we tired way- 
farers lay outstretched on our pine-bough beds, 
the sudden and startling challenge of the owl. 
There seems to be no such thing as absolute 
silence in this world, but the sounds of the 
wilderness (like its sights and smells) are mostly 
sweet, and it is no slight pleasure to be for 
a while beyond hearing of the locomotive's 
harsh whoop, the din of mills and traffic, and all 
the nerve-racking noises of town and trade. 
Then how good is plainest fare eaten by the 
camp-fire, how sound and refreshing the sleep 
of the bivouac, and what a relish for life and 
work the keen morning air imparts ! The cas- 
cades which abound in the Pemigewasset forest 
are of surpassing beauty, and all along the East 
Branch there are charming bits of the wildest 
character, as the rapid stream winds its devious 
way among myriads of mossy, spray-sprinkled 
boulders and stones of every hue, hemmed in 



IN THE WOODS. 



123 



by massive walls of undergrowth and towering 
trees. Emerging from the forest, the pedes- 




trian's arduous enterprise is crowned finally by 
a wonderful spectacular view of the White 
Mountain Notch from the steep slope of Mount 
Willey. 



124 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



In every wood there are miniature woods, 
and so on, down to the smallest visible growth 
of starry moss. One need not be a naturalist 
to distinguish a huckleberry bush 
from an elm ; but in the rich month 
of August the display of wild flow- 
ers, vines, and ferns is something 
to make one long for more knowl- 
edge of these gracious things. 
Asters, clematis, sumac, tansy, 
snapdragon, golden-rod, althea, 
marshmallow, pride-of- 
the-meadow, and many 
like them, warm the 
pathway's side, and 
deck the swamp and 
woodland with more 
than the decorous 
beauty of cultivated 
flowers. The crushed 
leaves of sweet-fern, 
trodden down by some passer, fill the air with 
the warm, languid odor of summer. Along the 
weedy lane the deep, honest, bricky red of the 




IN THE WOODS. 



125 



sumac glows prodigally, and in the homely gar- 
den of the farmer's daughter the now famous 
sunflower lifts its lavish disk of gold, down 
there by the long grape-vine arbor of rustic 
cedar, a tunnel of generous verdure, paved with 
a mosaic of wavering light and shade, such a 
foyer as Paul Baudry could not match. 

The most solemn wood is that of tall, straight 
pines, which stand in nearly regular ranks, 
forming stately aisles, and suggesting the spon- 
taneous architecture of sylvan cathedral builders. 
In Courbet's great picture of "The Quarry" 
the verdant twilight of the pine forest is richly 
translated, and the magnificent coloring, equal 
to that of a Veronese, is worthy of the theme. 
Yet a Belgian critic wittily wanted to know in 
what Parisian studio Courbet had found such 
a neat grove. It is well enough for all of us 
to take some things for granted, among which 
(the Belgian safely might have assumed) the 
French iconoclast's knowledge of his native 
Vosges woods and hills was not open to ques- 
tion ; and it must be mortifying for an author- 
ity who sets the petty masters of Antwerp 



126 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

and Brussels above Courbet, to think that "the 
laugh is on himself," instead of on the outcast 
whose arrogance was so cruelly humbled in his 
last days. 

To jump from the Vosges to Vermont, well- 
named state, I think that the complexion and 
character of our own green woods have never 
been more faithfully reported than in the paint- 
ings of Marcus Waterman, an artist of singular 
merit and originality, whose power of acute 
observation is extraordinarily developed, and 
whose execution is broad without wanting in 
particularity. 

Among the most eloquent descriptions of 
woods in our language, certain lines in the 
" Alastor" of Shelley are pre-eminently inspired. 
There are no more apt touches in all the litera- 
ture of the subject than such as occur in the 
passage beginning :- 

" The noonday sun 
Now shone upon the forest, one vast mass 
Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence 
A narrow vale embosoms. . . ." 



IN THE WOODS. 



127 



The observation of Nature disclosed by this 
extremely beautiful passage is as intimate and 
loving as ever a painter employed, and is enough 




to show with what reason this poet shares with 
Wordsworth the regard of so many landscapists. 
The little forest of Mormal, described so 
prettily by Robert Louis Stevenson in his "In- 
land Voyage," was perfumed with sweet-brier, 
and he thought it the most imposing piece in 






128 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

Nature's repertory. The smell of trees he con- 
siders the sweetest and most fortifying of all 
smells. Like Heine, and like Merlin, he would 
be buried under the oaks. De Musset preferred 
to lie among the willow's roots ; for its pallor 
was dear to him, and he fancied that its shade 
would rest lightly on the earth above him ; 
this harmless ambition has been gratified. 






MOODS OF THE SEA. 

THE sea is spoken of as if it were a free 
agent, and blamed or praised accordingly. 
In fact it is the slave of the winds and the 
moon, and acts only in obedience to their power. 
It is sullen only when the clouds are heavy 
above it, and cheerfully reflects the gladness of 
blue skies. Its passion is borrowed from the 
madness of the airs that blow upon it, and it is 
in no degree responsible. For poetry's sake, 
however, and because of ancient associations 
stronger than we realize, the sea will not only 

129 



1 




130 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



be personified by generations yet unborn, but 
Neptune will still be scolded for the mischief 
wrought by Boreas, yEolus, Luna, and all the 
crew of wind-gods that roam over the sounding 
main, as ready for wicked work now as they 
were in the days of Ulysses. 




So the moods of the sea are largely due to 
external influences, as the moods of men are. 
It is simply a huge instrument of destiny ; 
mighty with a higher might than its own ; Om- 
nipotence uses it to work out its inscrutable 



MOODS OF THE SEA. 131 

designs on the individual and on nations ; the 
vast theatre of countless tragedies, changeful 
yet ever essentially the same, it is the most 
beautiful and the most mysterious element in 
this world of beauty and of mystery. When a 
light breeze is blowing from the east in the 
early morning, and a white haze dulls the out- 
lines of the shore, the whole surface of the sea 
is a tremulous array of dazzling flashes, quiver- 
ing with points of molten silver ; each ripple 
fires its little sunbeam of intolerable radiance at 
the sight ; it is a shining world without shade. 
The local color of the water is pale blue, 
approaching a greenish hue, but the sun makes 
the whole expanse a crystal carnival of light. 
So joyous and peaceful is this holiday aspect of 
the sea, that, seeing it thus on the morning- 
after a great storm, it is natural to accuse it of 
the basest hypocrisy ; for has it not within the 
twenty-four hours swallowed up most cruelly 
many brave ships and men ? and how can it put 
on at once this heavenly smile ? is it not a mon- 
strous lie to say all is well ? 

A northeaster in the autumn clothes every- 



132 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



thing in dull grays. The water is of a dirty, 
dull light brown ; on the crests of the waves 
where they break, the brown becomes a dirty, 
dull yellow, then dissolves in a dirty, dull white 




'1 



&4&' 



foam. The sky is purple at the east, with 
vague forms of cold, smoky gray against it. 
The line of the horizon is lost in mist. Every 
hue and every form is inexpressibly dull. In 
such weather it is easy to understand why 
Henri Regnault swore an eternal haine an gris. 



MOODS OF THE SEA. 135 

Such are our New England winter storms — 
gray, gray, gray. One almost forgets what the 
blessed sun looks like, so persistently do the 
leaden clouds hatefully hang over the frozen 
earth. Haine an gris ! 

In a warm southerly storm, when the taste of 
the wind is soft and briny, the sea is a dun 
color, or cream-brown ; the white horses race 
merrily as far out as the sight carries ; fitful 
gleams of sunshine illuminate long streaks 
of tossing greenish water, bounded by sober 
shadows where dense rain scuds over the deep. 
A sudden burst of light reveals a brig's upper 
spars above the corrugated horizon ; then all's 
closed in again, the mist enwraps the foam- 
bordered rocks, the rain beats spitefully and 
stings like sleet, the wind renews its uproar 
with augmented energy, the surf grinds and 
pulsates in hollow rhythm on the sands. On 
such a day as this, it is not hard to sympathize 
with Byron's virile apostrophe to the ocean. It 
is exhilarating to inhale deeply the breath of a 
summer tempest ; to be in it and of it ; to feel 
its wetness and rude violence ; to laugh at the 



I36 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

gale's fury. Rough and boisterous, not tt> be 
trifled with, the sea is a hearty, wholesome fel- 
low, whose qualities grow on acquaintance, 
and, within the wide bounds of a servitude 
borne so easily that it takes on the appearance 
of freedom, it is a good friend to man. 

Statistics might be made to prove how it 
clothes and feeds many men, and kills but a 
small proportion of the host that lives on it ; 
what pestilences would sweep away multitudes 
if it were not for the sanitary services of the 
tides ; how many lives are saved yearly by the 
purity and tonic properties of its air. Thus, 
though the individual victim cannot console 
himself by any such philosophy, the romantic 
story of averages pleads for the ocean. Some- 
times, it must be confessed, the elements seem 
to be moved by a curious perversity that makes 
of them the most implacable foes to humanity. 
The solitary, hand-to-hand struggle of a man 
with the sea, — the one animated by love, the 
other by blind hate, — this was the splendid 
theme of Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the Sea," 
in which the man, after unheard-of efforts, pre- 



MOODS OF THE SEA. 137 

vailed, only to be conquered at last by a maid's 
unkindness. And so he sought that deep har- 
bor of storm-beaten souls which Ariel sings : — 

" Full fathom five thy father lies ; 
Of his bones are coral made ; 
Those are pearls that were his eyes : 

Nothing of him that doth fade, 
But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange. 11 

The imagination of all poets has been affected 
by that great unexplored graveyard of nations, 
— the bottom of the ocean. We know that there 
are high mountains, and deep valleys, caves, 
rocks, meadows, and impenetrable forests, where 
wondrous marine monsters rove down there, — 
a whole unknown world, forever hid from mortal 
sight, of which the most fantastic dreams can 
hardly furnish a parallel. The future explorer 
who shall carry out the ingenious suggestion of 
Jules Verne will see through the windows of 
his submarine vessel such beauties and such 
horrors as fancy has never painted. It is no 
wonder that sailors are superstitious. Who does 



138 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

not believe in mermaids ? I do not mean the 
kind for many years exhibited in Boston and 
Amsterdam museums, but the genuine musical 
and green-haired sirens, the femmes marines of 
the old traditions. One of these was caught by 
a Dutch seaman, who married her : at least 
Dumas says so in " Les Manages du Pere 
Olifus," and a terrible dowry of trouble she 
brought to the old reprobate. 

Few subjects present so many difficulties to 
the painter as the sea, because it will not keep 
still. This country has given birth to a consid- 
erable number of marine artists who have dis- 
tinguished themselves in their arduous specialty. 
I need refer only to Winslow Homer ; and he is 
to be set above many that are honorable in that 
he has the imagination to cope with immensity. 
By some artful touch he suggests the unspeak- 
able extent of unseen ocean stretching leagues 
on leagues away beyond the horizon ; with a few 
brush strokes he converts Winsor and Newton 
inanimate into the living buoyancy, the perpet- 
ual motion, and the baffling light-glances of the 
waves ; and finally in dramatic contrast with all 



tt' 



ift 




V(*>^*fc'i^5?ta 






.'i--:iinV',lJ'- 






$.Vs*- 






MOODS OF THE SEA. 



141 



this brute bulk and untamable power he places 
the physical insignificance of man, who, by his 
ingenuity and bravery, is enabled to profit by 
the forces of Nature. Ships and sailors, and all 
things that have to do with the blue water, he 
knows well, and paints with hearty sympathy in 
a manly style. There is a fearful loneliness and 
desolation in his picture of a Gloucester fisher- 
man lost in his dory at nightfall on the Grand 
Banks. High and cold the black waves toss all 
about the little craft, and the last light is fading 
from the sky, even as hope fades from the poor 
fellow's heart. The worst of it is that it is so true. 
In just this awful way hundreds of Gloucester 
men go to their death every year ; and still 
in spite of danger and foreign malice the hunt 
for codfish and dollars goes on, while the army 
of widows and orphans grows apace. 

Those who remember the comical controversy 
which raged over the "Slave Ship" of Turner, 
when it was exhibited in Boston, will perhaps 
appreciate the following anecdote, as illustrating 
a vulgar form of lay criticism : A person stand- 
ing in front of an excellent marine painting in 



142 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

a picture-gallery turned to an acquaintance, and 
said, dogmatically, " Well, I have never seen 
sea water of that color, and I do not believe 
that any one ever has." The reply, which 
struck me as very sensible, was to this effect : 
" I have seen the water of so many colors under 
various conditions of light, that I should have 
no doubt of the truth of the picture, even if I 
had never noticed this particular effect. I see 

that Mr. painted it, and as he has been 

studying the sea for the last forty years, I pre- 
sume that he has seen a good many things that 
you and I have never observed." The rebuke 
was gently expressed, and well deserved. It is 
capable of wide application. 

Speaking of Turner reminds me of the 
" Fighting Temeraire," and of how naval archi- 
tecture has degenerated, since the day of that 
vessel, in a pictorial sense. The old wooden 
ships were royally handsome under sail, but this 
iron age in which we live is sadly non-pictur- 
esque, and what could be uglier than a Mon- 
itor unless it were a Merrimac ? There is 
something about a square-rigged vessel that is 



MOODS OF THE SEA. 143 

majestic ; even a little brig looks more imposing 
than a three-masted schooner of thrice her ton- 
nage. Perhaps this is prejudice : there are glo- 
rious memories for us Americans connected with 
the old type of ships. New England has been 
a nursery for hardy mariners in the past, and it 
may be hoped that the race of the Yankee sail- 
ors has not wholly died out. The brave old 
salts who made our flag respected wherever it 
waved, the bold skippers of New Bedford, Nan- 
tucket, the Vineyard, Provincetown, and New 
London, who unfurled the stars and stripes amid 
the icy solitudes of the Antarctic Circle and the 
surges of the South Pacific, are gone ; but it is 
not certain that their grandsons will rest con- 
tented always to live ashore. 

In Clark Russell's best stories there are 
some well-studied word-pictures of the broad 
ocean, though he piles on the adjectives almost 
too profusely when he comes to a storm, and 
one does lay down such books as "The Wreck 
of the Grosvenor " with the impression that 
the author has had more than his fair share 
of rousfh weather. There is no mistaking his 



144 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



knowledge of his subject, nor his enthusiasm 
for it; but a sailor should have no aversion to a 
little dulness, and there is nothing more fasci- 
nating than certain pages in "Two Years before 
the Mast" and "The Red Rover," where a per- 






-v 



vX 1 



bSbIp--? 5 *! 







feet trade-wind monotony reigns supreme, and 
the reader feels that he may drop asleep at any 
moment, hearing the swish of the water alongside 
and feeling the soft salt wind fanning his face. 
Happy are those sailors who have no history. 



NOCTURNE. 

NIGHT in the country, — starless, moonless, 
rayless, unmitigated night. Darkness 
which can be touched, smelt, breathed ; a 
pelting rain-storm raging ; a blind-man's buff 
bandage bound over the earth ; blank, bottom- 
less blackness everywhere. 

In the very dead of such a night as this, 
imagine the old-school country doctor of New 
England, summoned urgently to the bedside of 
a distant patient, setting forth in his chaise. 
Accustomed to perambulate the lonely roads at 
all hours, in all seasons, and in all sorts of 
weather, he is soon nodding drowsily over the 
loose reins, the intelligent horse being better 
able than his driver to find the way, and full as 
anxious to get to his destination. The veteran 
nag has something of the faculty of a nyctolo- 
pus; he holds a steady jog-trot through the end- 

M5 



I46 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

less shadows, splashing unconcernedly through 
the mud and the pools, head down, but with 
never a stumble. Over the hills where the 
night wind blows keen and damp ; through the 
woods where the carriage-hood brushes showers 
of spray from overhanging boughs ; thundering 
over shaky, unseen, wooden bridges beneath 
which black streams are rolling swiftly ; past 
the village tavern from which the hoarse voices 
of belated revellers come vaguely in profane 
song ; by the shore whose breakers mingle 
their voices in the storm's wild chorus ; now 
with creaks and groans of ancient axles the 
patient steed's freight is hauled up a lengthy 
slope ; a dim silhouette of barns and haystacks, 
woods and fields, appears against the murky 
sky ; a tallow-dip gleams feebly through a farm- 
house window ; " Ah, doctor, how glad I am 
that you have come at last ! " 

The visit concluded, the physician starts for 
home. Midway a thick forest stands on one 
side of the road, and on the other side meadows 
slope easily down to the edge of a swamp. The 
rain has ceased, and at this point begins an 



NOCTURNK. 



H7 




• ■ 



■ 












impromptu exhi- 
bition of fire- 
works, or fireflies' 
festival. Low 
and high, near 
and far, among 
the trees and 
down over the 
meadows, in the 
road and every- 
where, it is noth- 
ing but a bewil- 
dering succession 
of quick Hashes, 
made the brighter 
by the dense darkness. A wanton 
whirl of fiery caprices envelops the vehicle, 
weaves a weird fabric of dizzy insect lightning, 
dances a furious zigzag ballet of living sparks 
all around. No feu de joie in imperial capital, 
exalting the pomp of conquering monarch, could 
ever eclipse the extraordinary activity and bril- 
liancy of this display. 

The majesty of the night, says Balzac, is 




148 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

truly contagious ; it awes and it inspires ; there 
is an indescribable potency in the thought, 
"everything slumbers, and I am awake." Sup- 
pose the good doctor's homeward road now 
brings him by the sea, as the clouds are break- 
ing away. There is a sudden glow beyond the 
eastern horizon, warm and ruddy ; it grows 
deeper, and may be a ship on fire. Now, where 
is your almanac-wisdom, dull-eyed doctor ? Do 
you not recognize that familiar flushed pate 
emerging from the brine, that ghost of a leer 
in the fat countenance, where extinct volcanoes 
and dried-up ocean-beds write their seams of 
dissipation on the lunar cheek and brow ? The 
chin appears at length, drippingly, as it seems ; 
and the flush fades to a most delectable amber. 
In a moment the magic path of winking light 
grows across the water — that unstable road by 
which our reeling fancy alone can walk to a dead 
world. The moon rides higher, and pales as it 
climbs ; the amber tint gives way to silver ; it 
shines with a cool and chastened light. The 
solitary spectator watches it as it dodges in and 
out among the clouds, now sailing fast before 



NOCTURNE. 



149 



the west wind. It fringes the ragged rack with 
a clear pearly radiance, playing a stately game 
of phantom hide-and-seek with the scurrying 
vapors. What is it that Shelley makes the 
cloud say ? 

"That orbed maiden with white fire laden 
Whom mortals call the Moon 
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor 
By the midnight breezes strewn." 

The quality of moonlight defies all analysis ; 
it is cool, but not hard ; white, but not colorless; 
passionless, but a great breeder of poetry and 
sentiment. In a picture of a farmyard at night 
which Millet drew, and which is an epitome of 
silence made visible, the moonlight falls like 
a heavenly caress on the rustic scene, bathing- 
it in a soft splendor of peace. A cat is seen 
crawling up a ladder which stands against the 
open door of the hayloft, and the sly, noiseless 
movement of this midnight prowler only empha- 
sizes the slumberous quietude that broods over 
the farm. The mind's ear harks, and hears 
mayhap a distant watch-dog baying the moon. 
The world's asleep, past snoring. 



I50 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

Down on the dark shore, where now a soft 
breeze hints at the sweet languor of southern 
nights, the waves, as they break on the rocks, 



WMA#**w ."—>■" -. ~ -' -^T" - 






/ 

throw up a spray of silvery light, dying away 
only to be incessantly renewed. The sea is 
alive with phosphorescence, and the shining 
jelly may be picked up in the hand where the 
surf rolls it up on the beach. Afloat, gently 



NOCTURNE. i 5 [ 

rocked by the illuminated swell, one might feel 
as if suspended in space, for there are stars 
beneath as well as overhead. The oarsman 
clips his blades into molten silver, and lifts from 
the water at each recovery a dripping marvel of 
pale evanescent fire. 



" ■'?■' 



It is commonly said that an astronomer must 
be a deist or a madman, and no doubt he who 
spends his nights in the observation and study 
of other worlds should have a healthy and rev- 
erent imagination. How much there is to know, 
and how little the wisest know ! In the pres- 
ence of the stars science is very humble. Old 
as the universe seems, are we not at the very 
beginning of things ? The vast unknown looms 



152 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

in the night, above, beneath, beyond, within ; 
the Sphinx's ancient riddle is still unguessed ; 
but it is certain that all this phantasmal scene 
is no less beautiful than amazing. While manly 
Science halts, groping its way upon the thresh- 
old of things, the heedless child Art enters 
boldly in, with its happy intuitions enjoys 
the visible universe, and listens in raptures to 
the music of the spheres. Unconcerned as to the 
inhabitants of Jupiter, not even knowing its 
name nor its course in the heavens, it sees with 
unalloyed pleasure the regal planet's lustre ; for 
appearances, not facts, are the subject of its 
contemplation. The full absurdity of Vedder's 
picture, " The Fates gathering in the Stars," 
would not be likely to strike any one so forcibly 
as an astronomer, who is in the habit of regard- 
ing these little twinklers as worlds de facto. Let 
savans smile at the illogical fancies of painters 
and poets ; perhaps these latter have the best of 
it, after all. Who has drunk deep enough from 
the Pierian spring to be beyond the danger-line ? 
It is just as well to consider the stars simply as 
stars, or even, if you please, as jewels on Night's 



NOCTURNE. 153 

Ethiopian forehead. Meanwhile, a smattering 
of astronomy is excellent, and goes a long way, 
on the veranda, of a balmy August evening. 
The outlines of the Virgin, the Serpent, the 



''**%?. 







^m.. 



u 



■■'■ >->'T 



Sm^^miy 



Archer, the Swan, the Eagle, the Harp, the 
Bear, and those other figures suggested to the an- 
cients by the groupings of the stars, from which 
the several constellations take their names, are 
easily learned, though rather fantastical, and 



154 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

there is no small accomplishment which yields 
better dividends of simple pleasure than the 
ability to recognize Venus and Jupiter, the red 
Arcturus, blue Altair, and that constant mid- 
summer friend Vega, which will, one night, a 
trifle of twelve thousand years hence, become 
the polar star. One comes to have preferences 
among the stars, and Vega, which has hung 
nearly overhead through so many pleasant warm 
evenings, is one of my favorites up there. Orion 
and the Pleiades are forever associated with the 
voluble lover of Locksley Hall, who gazed on 
them through love-sick eyes from his ivied case- 
ment. Venus doubtless presided over the for- 
tunes of Hardy's smitten astronomer in his 
picturesque nocturnal romance of "Two on a 
Tower." In the long run — and theirs is surely 
a long run — the far-sighted stars witness a 
good many strange doings on our little foot- 
stool. Above the big New England towns, for 
instance, they see a broad pallid glare in the 
atmosphere, the reflection of thousands of elec- 
tric lamps ; while between these centres, rushing 
headlong through the darkness, rumbling, fiery- 



NOCTURNE. 155 

eyed, snake-like monsters crawl over the coun- 
try ; up and down the bays and sounds ply giant 
night-birds, the regular throbbing of whose 
watery pinions is carried afar by the wind. In 
the city interminable lines of gas-lamps, yellow 
and flickering, cast their unsteady reflections on 
the black pavements ; colored lights of car and 
shop make festive bouquets of brilliancy ; and 
when passing showers have wet the streets, the 
black cabs shine resplendent in their moist 
varnish. "It was but yesternight," says Castor 
to Pollux, " that the sunless side of yon busy 
sphere slept while we watched ; now is it be- 
come owlish, and insomnia turns it inside out. 
It matters little ; let the worldlings fret ; their 
speck will be consumed in a million years and 
blotted out. Tis well : I hate to shine on 
sordid fools. The experiment of placing men 
on that star has turned out ill." 

" Wherefore concluded so rashly, neighbor ? 
Perhaps the sun fails to warm and cheer the 
day-side of all that hapless ball, and man is 
driven to brighten his sleeping time by facti- 
tious rays." 



1 5 6 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



&* 

:-.« 




• 



1 %\f v t \:. 



"Aye, but I hear that the race has cut down 
trees to build ugly houses withal ; fouled the 
rivers ; made huge towns of brick ; painted bad 
pictures ; set up kings ; maintained armies and 
navies, and waged bloody wars for conquest ; 
and finally that it now worships the base metal 
called gold so fervently that, the day not being 
long enough, it turns night into day by fiendish 



NOCTURNE. 



157 



arts to pursue its cult. Decidedly the experi- 
ment has failed. Look now at Aldebaran : no 
men there ! the trees and rivers are unspoiled, 
there are no houses nor towns, no bad pictures, 
armies, navies, kings, nor wars ; in fact, nothing 
but universal peace and sobriety, since man has 
never been nor ever will be there." 




" True, most sapient Castor, many sad deeds 
are done on that star ; yet I have been told a 
time was when the arts were living forces there, 
and one man there was in particular who, like 
a lantern in a shadowy place, made their rude, 



158 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

dull ways glorious. It may be that many before 
him had perceived how life is born of contrasts, 
so that darkness gives worth to light ; but the 
world waited for this man to reveal in its com- 
pleteness the mystic poetry of the dark. He 
touched with no uncertain hand a minor chord, 
till then mute, which vibrated with a melan- 
choly melodiousness ; and the world discovered 
through Rembrandt's art that night no less 
than day was clothed in beauty ; the half-seen 
held its potent suggestions of loveliness ; and 
rich gems of the imagination could be dug from 
the dim mines of evening. It was this sombre 
Dutch recluse, in fine, who first found a material 
rhyme and correspondence for the twilight mood 
of the soul." 




THE BEAUTY OE COMMON THINGS. 



TO eyes rightly trained, common things are 
as beautiful as any conceivable grand, 
splendid, extraordinary objects in the world ; 
but because the faculty of observation is either 
wholly or almost undeveloped in the vast ma- 
jority of individuals, this truth seems incom- 
prehensible to most men, and must probably 
always remain so. The reason that artists are 
happy beings, in spite of whatever want of appre- 
ciation and encouragement may be their lot, is 
chiefly this : that they draw enjoyment from ;i 

J 59 



l6o ARCADIAN DAYS. 

source inaccessible to the mass of mankind, but 
for them inexhaustible, eternal, without price. 
The extent to which the faculty of seeing form 
and color in Nature may be cultivated, appears 
as boundless as the relish for the exercise of it ; 
so that a lifetime is all too short for the study. 
It is a road which lengthens out before us as 
we advance, with constant variety in its vistas, 
fresh delights each hour, and new worlds to 
conquer from clay to day. The ardent spirit 
of the student animates the artist to the end of 
his career ; he is always learning ; and knowl- 
edge, which is power, is also his greatest pleas- 
ure. This ruling passion fills his cup to the 
brim. Corot, in his last moments, grasped in 
fancy a brush, and cried out, " How beautiful ! " 
saying he had never seen such admirable land- 
scapes. 1 I have a notion that the old man is 
still painting landscapes somewhere. The ap- 
preciation of Nature grows by what it feeds on, 
and becomes an instinct and an enduring love. 

1 Dumesnil, " Souvenirs intimes de Corot." Troyon and 
Michel, in their final delirium, had similar visions of incom- 
parably fine landscapes. 



THE BEAUTY OF COMMON THINGS. 161 

The cockney sees nothing to look at in the 
country, and by the same law the animals that 
live in Mammoth Cave have no eyesight. To a 
whole and healthy temperament, everything in 
the world is interesting, and there is nothing 
so mean but it has some qualities worth observ- 
ing. Art is intensely democratic, as well as 
immensely aristocratic. It is for the few, the 
elect, to comprehend in its fulness ; but its sym- 
pathies are world-wide and all-embracing. This 
need be no paradox : let us look into things 
as well as on their surface. Is there a dividing 
line between beauty and ugliness ? Sometimes 
it seems doubtful. Homely things are unutter- 
ably fine when looked at through sympathetic 
spectacles. Sacred associations beautify and 
enrich the wrinkled features of age, and sanc- 
tify the crumbling walls of the humble cottage. 
Memory tints with divine hues some of the 
most forlorn and obscure corners of the earth. 
I have seen a painting of a pig-pen which was 
truly handsome, and it did not need to lie to be 
so. When Ruskin referred contemptuously to 
Murillo's "Beggar Boy" in the Louvre, as an evi- 



1 62 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

dence of the painter's love of dirt, he betrayed a 
strain of English philistinism in his own make-up 
which he has been ready enough to condemn in 




his compatriots. Troyon made known his wish 
to make a sketch of a certain heifer ; and when 
the well-pleased owner washed and groomed the 






THE BEAUTY OF COMMON THINGS. 163 

animal for the occasion, the painter was so dis- 
gusted that he refused to paint her picture at 
all. Priggishness and prudery are more vulgar 
and more hateful, in the light of art, than any 
other forms of affectation. All artificiality is at 
war with Nature, and art too. The secret of 
beauty is fitness. Whatever is in the scene 
should belong there. There is nothing super- 
fluous in the woods and fields : everything has 
its place and is adapted to its part. 

Though the beauty of common things is no 
modern discovery, we are constantly under the 
necessity of justifying to ourselves by the light 
of to-day our re-discoveries and re-castings of 
old truths ; and in landscape-painting, the prac- 
tice of this age has departed more widely from 
the track of tradition than in most other depart- 
ments of the art. Landscape in the days of 
the Carracci was mainly employed as back- 
ground for figures, and a stretch of far hills 
usually sufficed, details, with occasional excep- 
tions, being neither desired nor desirable. 
When figures and buildings in turn became 
accessories to landscape in Claude's time, the 



164 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 








study of trees 
and other ob- 
jects in outdoor 
light was seri- 
ously begun, as 
we have ample 
proof in the 
" Liber Verita- 
tis " ; but this 
studv was not carried to its 
logical conclusions in the fin- 
ished work, which was a glow- 
ing synthesis, or abstract vision, in which the 
distance drew the eye towards a golden dream- 
land, and nothing seemed near and familiar. On 
the other hand, the Dutchmen, who were noth- 
ing if not close to the ground, so to say, painted 
the brown dirt, the gray tree-trunks and rocks, 
the blue and white skies of their country, with 
such loyalty, sturdy unadorned truth, and sound- 
ness of workmanship, that the most admirable 
externals of modern landscape-painting may be 



THE BEAUTY OF COMMON THINGS. 1 65 

said to be their inventions, which, in common 
with many valuable inventions, are so simple 
that it seems surprising that no one had thought 
of them before. Constable was not slow to 
catch his cue, and to adapt the excellent foreign 
formulas to English conditions ; and all the 
France of 1830, thrilling with a new impulse, 
turned promptly to the ways of Nature, and 
inaugurated such a prodigious revival of land- 
scape art that the receding waves of its influ- 
ence have reached even these distant shores. 
The art has grown nearer to Nature and less 
conventional. Among the most remarkable 
changes in the practice of it is that from the 
representation of the general to the particular, 
from the scenic and the panoramic to the 
intimate and actual. It is less picturesque and 
more studied. There is less interest in the 
distance and more in the foreground. Men 
were wont to run off to the Alps, the Andes, 
Niagara, for stupendous views ; now they paint 
their own village dooryards. I confess to enjoy- 
ing both classes of subjects, but with a posi- 
tive preference for the modest dooryard ; for 



1 66 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

there can be no doubt that is difficult enough 
for most of our talents, and that artists nowa- 
days study very hard. 




If New England rural life is in any manner 
barren, it is because the people make it so ; 



THE BEAUTY OF COMMON THINGS. 1 67 

but let us not be too ready to accept the popu- 
lar literary view of the matter. The Yankee 
character, Lowell says, has wanted neither open 
maligners, nor even more dangerous enemies 
in the persons of those unskilful painters who 
have given to it that hardness, angularity, 
and want of proper perspective, which in truth 
belonged, not to their subject, but to their own 
niggard and unskilful pencil. The same may 
be said of the outside aspects of the country 
in which Mr. Biglow lives. It is good to guard 
against falling into the heresy that the familiar 
scenes are ugly because they are familiar. 
Insist on it that beauty is everywhere ; for so 
it is ; aye, even the toad, ugly and venomous, 
"wears yet a precious jewel in his head." Not 
only the hills and mountains, plains and valleys, 
woods and groves, brooks and rivers, bays and 
cliffs, flowers and weeds, ponds and lakes, greens 
and gardens, highways and byways, bushes and 
vines, cascades and pools, and all the natural 
objects in New England, but also the houses, 
barns, sheds, fences, bridges, mills, railroads, 
steamboats, wharves, taverns, stores, meeting- 



168 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



houses, burial-grounds, wagons, ploughs, barn- 
yards, beehives, pig-pens, hen-coops ; in a word, 
all that man has added to the scene should 
deserve the study of the realist who looks with 
his own eyes, regardless of what conventional- 
ism calls prosaic, vulgar, and commonplace. 







These things are of the soil, and distinguish 
our landscape from that of France or England : 
thus if a man with the lofty soul, loyal nature, 
and tender sympathy of a Jean Francois Millet 
should one day paint rustic New England some- 
what with the spirit in which he painted rustic 



THE BEAUTY OF COMMON THINGS. 169 

France, I for one would very much like to see 
the results, and would not be astonished if he 
touched a very soft place in the American heart. 
"We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes 
have no clear vision," said the Concord seer. 
The man who makes us see it where we saw 
none before, is our benefactor. 



THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN LAND- 
SCAPE ART. 

IN his noble essay on Art, Emerson says that 
no man can quite emancipate himself from 
his age and country : " It is in vain that we look 
for genius to reiterate its miracles in the old 
arts ; it is its instinct to find beauty and holi- 
ness in new and necessary facts, in the field 
and roadside, in the shop and mill." It has 
occurred to some of the most completely alien- 
ated sons of America that "it's a wretched 
business, this virtual quarrel of ours with our 
own country, this everlasting impatience to get 
out of it." 1 And as Rowland "looked along 
the arch of silvered shadow and out into the 
lucid air of the American night ... he felt 
like declaring that here was beauty too — beauty 
sufficient for an artist not to starve upon it." 

1 " Roderick Hudson," by Henry James. 
170 



FUTURE OF AMERICAN LANDSCAPE ART. 



171 



This has a charming touch of condescension in 
it, of that condescension which formed the text 
for one of the finest essays in the language, 
prompted by righteous indignation, and having 
in it the ring of manly independence and hearty 




patriotism. Then here is another quotation 
to illustrate my theme : it is from Edward 
Strahan's whimsical account of his wanderings 
abroad, "The New Hyperion," in which he 
remarks that there are two things the Amer- 
ican-born, however long a resident abroad, 
never forgives the lack of in Europe, — the 



172 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

perpetual street-mending of an American town, 
and the wooden bridges. " Far away," he 
writes, " in my native meadows gleams the 
silver Charles : the tramp of horses' hoofs comes 
to my ears from the timbers of the bridge. 
Here, with a pelt and a scramble, your bridge 
is crossed ; nothing addresses the heart from 
its stony causeway. But the low, arched tubes 
of wood that span the streams of my native 
land are so many bass-viols, sending out mellow 
thunders with every passing wagon, to blend 
with the rustling stream and the sighing woods. 
Shall I never hear them again?" This strikes 
me as a very pretty touch of sentiment, but it 
is quoted mainly to prove how true Emerson's 
words are, that no man can quite emancipate 
himself from his country. 

In the incomparable month of October, the 
golden month, when the morning air tastes 
pure and sweet, and the trees have donned 
their splendid fall attire ; when a thin blue haze 
veils the far brown hills and the russet groves, 
and the roads are carpeted with a rich occidental 
rug of dead leaves which rustles crisply under 



FUTURE OF AMERICAN LANDSCAPE ART. 173 



foot ; when the 
days growing 
shorter make 
themselves 
most regret- 
ted ; and the 
chill which de- 
scends with 
the coming of 
dusk hints of 
frosts; when 
the odor of 
brush-fires fills 
the sharp air 
with its sug- 
gestion of No- 
v e m b e r ' s 
harsher grip; 
and small boys 
make the 

woods resound with the eager outcries of the 
chestnut-hunter, — in these October days there 
is no country like this New England of ours. 
Words are but poor things to describe what any 







l<Ujgj|My 









"v., 



! 






174 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



one may see of its store of beauty. There 
are delightful quiet villages perched on airy 
hilltops, overlooking panoramas of vast com- 
pass, bounded by range upon range of moun- 
tains so distant that their undulating outlines 




J&A-: 



•' ■'•;}'■ •ir.---''.-. ■" 



of pale blue almost melt into the sky ; here 
are the quaint homes of a frugal, contented, 
simple people, who have no histories, and so 
must be happy ; there are ocean-like stretches 
of forest, solitudes of a well-nigh primeval 
silence, broken by singing streams, great sheets 
of water whose names recall the aborigines ; 



FUTURE OF AMERICAN LANDSCAPE ART. 175 

farmhouses which look thoroughly like homes, 
as permanent as the hills on which they stand, 
and as congenial with their surroundings as 
the trees and rocks : not like intruders and 
impertinences, they form parts of the land- 
scape, and are more than mere irrelevancies 
and warts upon it. For as there is no non- 
sense about Nature, a sensible building, how- 
ever plain, always harmonizes with it. Does 
not good sense form the durable base of 
all good art? This is the explanation of the 
fact that wherever in New England enlighten- 
ment builds its home, there is now a return to 
solidity of construction, simplicity of form, and 
the wise adaptation of means to end. Thus, 
from the aesthetic point of view, New England 
is growing more and more attractive every year. 
As the taste for country life becomes stronger 
among refined people, this improvement will 
be more marked. There is a fine significance 
in the good old adage that God made the 
country, and man made the town. 

The early stages of aesthetic education are 
naturally attended by some painful barbarities, 



176 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

but we cannot afford to despise any steps, how- 
ever tottering, in that direction. The feminine 
instinct for decoration is a force which must be 
counted upon in this struggle. If the father is 
proud of his daughter's skill in the so-called or- 
namentation of screens and placques, it is quite 
possible that his grandchildren may start in life 
with a snug capital of good taste. After another 
generation or two, the arts of design will be 
regarded as something more than child's play, 
and will stand at least on a par with banking, 
railroading, wool, and leather. There is a vast 
deal of good sense among the "common people," 
as the politicians call them, and, now that we 
are beginning to get over our hurry, and to 
realize that time and art are both long, and con- 
sequently that anything worth doing at all is 
worth doing well, the inquiry is often made, 
What is the quarrel between the artists and 
the public? which party is in the right? and 
why don't Americans back up their artists ? 
These are interesting questions, which are not 
easily answered in a satisfactory way, but I 
shall try to suggest one of the chief causes of 



FUTURE OF AMERICAN LANDSCAPE ART. 177 

the trouble and the means by which it may be 
overcome. 

The main quarrel between the people at large 
and the artists is that the artists are at heart 
Europeans. Is there not ground for this belief? 
To ninety-nine of every hundred Americans it 
means more than a mere lack of patriotism too : 
it means something like dilettanteism ; and when 
you look at certain works of art so-called, this 
suspicion seems only too well founded. This 
being still a tremendously busy country, and 
very much in earnest, anything of that sort is 
especially detestable. I shall be told that there 
is narrow-mindedness and prejudice back of this 
feeling, and that may be very true. Patriotism 
is a narrow-minded virtue, but who would be the 
man without a country ? 

If there be one thing absolutely certain about 
the future of our art, it is this : that it must be 
more and more American. It can never amount 
to much without sending its roots deeper and 
deeper down into our own native soil. The 
familiar talk about the European art atmosphere 
is becoming tiresome cant. The time is come 



178 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



to forswear Rome, Paris, and London, and give 
our energies to our country. This is more than 
mere sentimentality ; it is policy, it is reason, 
it is logic. Athens and Tokio made their at- 
mosphere by staying at home. Here, at home, 










where we were born, we are to fight out our bat- 
tles, nowhere else ; and if ever we are to have a 
national art, this is the ground from which it 
must grow. Paris and Munich and Antwerp 
have done about all they can for us. The babe 
must be weaned, and learn to trust his own legs 
too. America is the place for Americans, and 



FUTURE OF AMERICAN LANDSCAPE ART. 1 79 

being an artist does not make one an exception 
to this rule. 

To paint our country well, we must first love 
it well ; to love it we have but to know it, and to 
know it we must live in it. With new matter 
must come a new manner. As the treatment 
should be adapted to the distinctive peculiarities 
of the theme, not only our American subjects, 
but the style of description also, must be our 
own. A man cannot be quite ingenuous in his 
work when he is constantly looking over his 
shoulder to see how others do theirs. As for 
the approval of foreigners, the surest way to 
secure the respect of the world is to respect our- 
selves. 

Let the American artist go forth alone, in the 
fields, in the woods, on the rivers, and forget that 
any man has lived, looked, loved, and painted 
before him. Let him abjure all the inflexible 
recipes of the academy, unlearn all uncongenial 
imported rules, throw away his useless baggage 
of preconceptions ; let him strive not to con- 
sider so much how his picture will look as how 
the subject does look ; let him look longer and 



i8o 



ARCADIAN DAYS. 



paint less; — is not this a serious business? 
The way to create a personal style is not to 
think of the style so much as the matter. 
Take a good shot at the truth, and lo ! you 
have brought down beauty. 




Let the heart yearn for the end, and the 
head will find the means. Let the passion to 
publish deeply felt truths move the intellect, 
and inspire the obedient hand. What is needed 
is the uncounterfeitable candor, the touching 
ingenuousness, the holy and great-hearted sim- 
plicity of the Raphaels and Angelicos of old — 



FUTURE OF AMERICAN LANDSCAPE ART. 181 

not borrowed from them, but born anew, here 
and now, out of totally different conditions ; and 
if it be not too chimerical, might not an Ameri- 




can sky and an American hillside, painted with 
the love and piety that they should evoke, give 
a sensation as fine and produce an impression 
as durable as was ever derived from classic can- 
vas inspired by fifteenth century faith ? 



1 82 ARCADIAN DAYS. 

Art has no country, it has been said, and truly 
its essence is universal ; but so long as men 
have homes and associations which are more or 
less precious to them, why not paint the sub- 
jects they know and love ? Destiny casts each 
man's lot in a certain place, for some purpose ; 
well for him if he can say, This is the best place 
for me to live and die ; for saying so, he creates 
his own paradise. 

It is impossible for a wanderer to be original ; 
when he is in Rome, he must do as the Romans. 
Our chameleon-like adaptability makes us pecu- 
liarly susceptible to foreign influences, for we 
haye little or none of the lofty independence of 
our British forefathers. It must be allowed that 
we are clever at imitation, but it is a pitiable 
distinction. How would it do to try staying at 
home awhile ? 






